Welcome to Blue Bloods, the most interesting new take on police dramas since FX unleashed the concept of rogue-cop-as-anti-hero in The Shield eight years ago. A potent brew of family melodrama, crime-thriller tension and conspiratorial intrigue, Blue Bloods may actually bring some viewers back onto the sinking ship of Friday-night television.
The show starts lightheartedly enough, with a line of crisp, new police-academy graduates boldly swinging their arms to the strains of New York, New York as they march out to collect their badges. Like a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover come to life, their faces are fresh and unscarred, earnest and hopeful.
They won’t stay that way long. As Blue Bloods zooms in on the Reagans, a multigenerational family of cops, the toll of police work is quickly visible. Police commissioner Frank (Tom Selleck) is no more successful at keeping the peace within his brawling family than he is at managing the venomous politics of his deparment.
Frank’s father Henry (Len Cariou, Damages), a former chief ousted for his impolitic bellicosity, is an unapologetic fascist who thinks real cops don’t bother with search warrants. Son Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), a tightly coiled Iraq vet, takes things a step farther: He’s just jeopardized a pedophile kidnapping case by beating and waterboarding a suspect.
On the other side of the family’s bitter internecine quarrels is daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan, Six Degrees), a prosecutor who tries to rein in Danny’s caveman tendencies but whose face contorts with rage when she’s compared to an ACLU lawyer. And caught in the crossfire is youngest brother Jamie (Will Estes, American Dreams) who turned his back on his Harvard law degree to join the force after a third brother was killed during a drug bust.
Jamie’s also keeping a secret: He’s just been asked to join an internal affairs investigation so covert that even his father doesn’t know about it, one that may take the family down with it.
Blue Bloods is not without its rough edges. At times the action feels forced, even trite. (When a handcuffed perp yelled “Police brutality!”, I half-expected to see Joe Friday and Perry Mason walk into the scene.)
But the uncertain touch with some of the police-work plotting devices are blown away by the show’s explosive family dynamics. Producers Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green worked on The Sopranos, and Blue Bloods shares its compulsion to domestic pyromania. Even outsiders sense that the Reagans are a domestic minefield, littered with the debis of divorces and ancient grudges. When Jamie’s law-school sweetheart tells him that, “We’re gonna be OK,” the words sound less like a reassurance than a plea. The Reagans are headed for trouble, but their tumble over the cliff promises to be a thrilling ride for us
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