In the US: Fridays, 10/9c, CBS
In the UK: Not yet acquired
In the neverending quest for new ways to do cop and legal dramas, the concept of the “super-format” has emerged (I just made up that name so don’t go looking for it anywhere else. It’s mine). So you want to do cop shows, but you also quite like the whole lawyer thing as well? Well, how about Law & Order, where you get both cops and lawyers: a twofer super-format. Or maybe you quite like stories about guys on patrol, rookie cops and detectives? Well, how about Southland, then? That’s a threefer super-format. Or perhaps you even like the mix of politics that you get at the top of the police hierarchy with the day-to-day police work of the rank and file as well as lawyers? Well, how about The Wire then?
Indeed, The Wire was perhaps the first of the “super-super format” shows: a format that tries to amalgamate everything to do with the legal system and look at it all equally. But post The Wire, what new super-super format can you have?
Blue Bloods rather cunningly does the very American thing of making it all about family. In this case, the Reagans, a New York Irish family of cops and lawyers. We have Tom Selleck, complete with his old Magnum PI moustache, as the New York chief of police. His dad is the former chief of police. He has two sons, one a detective (Donnie Wahlberg), the other a beat cop. He had another son, who was also a beat cop, but who died in the line of duty. And he has a daughter (Bridget Moynahan) who is an assistant district attorney.
The result is a show in which you get to see all aspects of New York policing, from the politics at the top to the investigations by detectives to the day-to-day issues of the average beat cop to the problems of the legal system – all while the politics of torture are discussed over Sunday lunch. For a while, it actually seems pretty good – and then six minutes before the end, we get the Blue Templars and everything falls apart.
Here’s a trailer: