Blue Bloods: CBS Series Executive Producer Talks About Drama’s Series Finale

Blue Bloods ended its fourteen-season run on CBS on Friday night, and the drama’s executive producer has now spoken about the series finale.

Tom Selleck, Donnie Wahlberg, Bridget Moynahan, Will Estes, Len Cariou, Marisa Ramirez, and Vanessa Ray. Recurring players are Abigail Hawk, Gregory Jbara, Robert Clohessy, Steve Schirripa, Dylan Walsh, and Will Hochman starred in the police family drama, which followed the Reagans – a law enforcement family living in New York City. The finale had the family battling a gang war with law enforcement as the targets.

EP Kevin Wade said the following about the Blue Bloods finale, per Deadline:

“Look, if you’re running for 14 years and almost 300 episodes, you have, by osmosis, an idea of what feels like it works in the editing room and feels like it works on Friday night at 10. So, it’s kind of the Greatest Hits without being silly about it, of what we do, of the kind of stories that we do for Frank, for Jamie, Danny, Jamie Aaron. The combining factor is the ones that we felt worked best and biggest as finales, had all of them pointed at the same case, dilemma, peril, jeopardy, whatever it was. We had talked about it a lot, especially Siobhan and I, and that’s what we came up with.”

Was this finale Wade had planned for the series all long? He also answered that question. He said the following:

“I never planned out an ending, ending for a show called Blue Bloods. I looked at and by I mean, we looked at what we felt were successful series finales for long running shows, comedies and dramas, and it seemed to me that the thing that they pretty much had in common was not beating you over the head with this is the last one. What they did was they gave you a really good episode, obviously, with a tip of the hat from the start. Then, for, let’s say, the last five minutes of the show, wrapping it up with that sense of anything we do from here on is going to be in your imagination. Anything you see in the last five minutes; we’re inviting you to imagine the show after the show is no longer on. Sopranos did it in a very significant, mercurial way. Mary Tyler Moore Show did it in a fun and bring a tear to your eye way. M.A.S.H. did a combination of the two. So, it was really just trying to hit that.  I don’t know that we got there, but we were aiming high in that sense.”

A Blue Bloods spin-off is in the early stages, but no details about the plot have been released. Wade revealed that he had not tried to use the finale to set up a spin-off. He said, “Look, Blue Bloods exist not as a lead character. It exists as long as it did and if people liked it because of the that family, that’s a lot of actors. Then going out from there, there’s Steve Schirripa and Marisa Ramirez and Greg Jbara, Bob Clohessy, Abigail Hawk, there were satellites that made the whole. You couldn’t just take one of them, place them in New Orleans and say, Blue Bloods New Orleans. So that was never an option. So in the ingredients in the kitchen for the finale, we didn’t try to do that, not purposefully or not not one way or the other. Simply believe me,  that just was not on the horizon when we were doing it.”

What do you think? Were you happy with how Blue Bloods ended? Do you want to see more of the Reagans in another series?