Nearly two years after the Reagans had their last Sunday dinner on Blue Bloods, Tom Selleck is still frustrated over the show’s cancellation.
The Golden Globe winner recently noted that the cast took a 25% pay cut in attempt to keep the CBS procedural going past its 14-season run, which lasted from 2010 to 2024, before it was succeeded by the Donnie Wahlberg-led spin-off Boston Blue.
“Blue Bloods was a labor of love… I think for everybody,” he said on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “The real truth to that is in the last year of [Blue Bloods], at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back. We’d already taken a 25 percent cut in salary. We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going.”
Selleck continued, “It was very frustrating because… out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television, Blue Bloods was number six in our fifteenth year. Nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get. It may be some kind of record to have the same cast intact for that length of time. Usually if it wasn’t a family, it would be different, but you know, you couldn’t very well replace Jamie [played by Will Estes] or Danny [Wahlberg] or anybody with another actor.
Having previously starred in shows like Magnum, P.I., Friends and Las Vegas, Selleck raved about his experience starring as patriarch, Commissioner Frank Reagan, on the Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess cop family drama.
“Maybe people don’t realize, but a lot of shows become miserable to work on. You get a lot of egos and ‘I’m not coming out of my dressing room until he’s coming out’… and it’s miserable,” explained Selleck. “Blue Bloods was never that.”
Following Blue Bloods‘ 2024 finale, Wahlberg reprised his role as Det. Danny Reagan in the spin-off Boston Blue, which premiered in October and has been renewed for Season 2, returning Oct. 9.
