The thread title is not a rhetorical question. I hate rhetorical questions. Growing up in the Church of God in Christ I was forced to sit through sermons that routinely lasted more than two hours and so abused rhetorical questions that Cato must have died anew every Sunday.
The thread title is also not a stealth attempt to slam the show. I rather like Blue Bloods and wish I had discovered it earlier in its run. Donnie Wahlberg is fun to watch (in theory; in practice I’d want his character, Danny, to be beaten with a club, arrested, stripped of all authority, and shipped to Toronto). Tom Selleck is fairly compelling as the Commissioner, almost enough to make me regret never watching an episode of Magnum P.I. (Almost.) Bridget Moynihan and Amy Carlson are both simultaneously intriguing and pretty. Will Estes is annoying, true, but there’s always the hope that he’ll emote at the wrong time and get killed, causing Danny to go on a murderous rampage that ultimately requires Frank to put him down like a dog. I suppose there’s something nice to be said about the actress who plays Nikki but I don’t know what it is.
But anyway … god! The coincidences! Danny might as well be Spider-Man, the way he encounters thieves, rapists, gang-bangers, and Welshmen around every corner. Why must every case Frank takes a personal interest in involve one of his children? Why must Erin always be the prosecutor in one of her brothers’ cases? Are there any 35,000 members of the NYPD in this universe, or actually only 17? Why has no one noticed that the former police commissioner used to be a murderous barber whose accomplise bakes his victims into meat pies?
Amy Carlson is v. pretty, though. I probably said that already but it bears repeating.
Anyway, what was I talking about? Right, the coincidence overuse. Let’s discuss that, or Blue Bloods in general, or the loss of Jennifer Esposito. I’m flexible.
I have noted and ignored the fact that Danny catches every interesting case and solves it in an hour. Not really much more contrived than most cop shows.
The all-solved-in-an-hour thing doesn’t bug me. It’s not an hour TO THE CHARACTERS.
It is, however, generally less than or equal to one week. That Reagan family dinner with all the cousins would drive me insane, even if I got to sit next to Linda.
I said nothing against Magnum. How could I, having never seen it?
Unforgettable pushes things as well. Keep in mind that the lead character has superhuman memory.
For the 9/7/14 episode True Identity.
[spoiler]1. The tech magically tracks down the friend of the BotW via street cams. (I forget what lead to this. It’s all soooo involved.)
In one of the pictures, a little pink pig logo is seen. (Infinite resolution of street cams applies of course.)
Carrie remembers seeing that logo amongst a load of crap in the BotW’s apartment.
The tech quickly tracks down the pig logo to a donut shop. (Pigs and donuts … ummmmm.)
They go to the donut shop. Don’t get much.
Near the donut shop they see a bunch of people hanging around smoking. Aha! A 12 step meeting. Obviously the BotW and her friend were going to that specific meeting!
They find a guy at that specific meeting how knows enough to track the friend down. Etc.
That’s just for one segment of the show. Continue more lucky breaks, near misses, amazing tech, to pad out the hour.[/spoiler]
Note that there are standard tropes in dramas such as the lead characters do everything, wrap things up in an hour, etc. But police procedurals really push this. The stars are first on the scene and rarely have backup, etc.
In this episode, for example:
[spoiler]Carrie and Al go to a rural area (outside their jurisdiction) to locate the friend of the BotW in a remote cabin (located thanks to luck, tech and memory). Just them. No local cops, etc. And a gang of heavily armed Mexican cartel guys are after her.
No need to place a call to the locals to get them there first. No backup. They weren’t even wearing vests! Against the cartel hitmen who of course show up. for a shoot out.[/spoiler]
The classic mystery “whodunit” style has almost disappeared from these shows in favor of convoluted sequences of events that even Agatha Christie would be ashamed of.
I agree about Danny. I’d love to see him demoted to a patrolman, where all the detectives could be condescending and snarky to him.
And I think I’ve mentioned this before, but does Linda have no living family at all? Doesn’t she ever want Sunday dinner with someone in her family? Even when one of her kids was in the hospital after an accident, no one from her family was there.
From her accent and word choices, I am guessing she married up. Is that why we don’t see her family?
I’d forgotten about the episode with the bicycle accident, but you’re right. I damn well HOPE she has no living parents or siblings in the city, because if she does they’re assholes.
That episode also had me breaking Rhymer Rule 147 and talking back to the screen, when Danny was taking calls about a case while his son was in the hospital and possibly dying. Under such circumstances one’s only response to people from work is, “Unless you are calling because there is a giant kaiju about to attack the city which only I can stop, leave me the fuck alone!”
What bugs me about the show is how sickeningly noble they all are. Frank especially.
Also, Nicki (played by Sami Gayle) sets my teeth on edge. How could a teenager whose relatives are all in law enforcement and who talk about it all the time in her presence be such a naif?
I haven’t seen Blue Bloods, but my favorite in the “just follow these cops around” genre was Mod Squad. Each of the three would in turn reconnect with an old friend, who just happened to be committing the very crimes they were investigating!
Blue Bloods isn’t quite that bad. But if some lifelong, trusted friend of Tom Selleck’s ever turns up, rest assured that he will turn out to be a criminal. Or at the very least, not actually criminal, but cheating on his wife or something like that. Watch enough episodes, and you start to realize that Frank Reagan must have been the only honest man among his group of friends growing up. Is this really the guy we want in charge of our police force? He sure does know a lot of shady characters.
How do you unintentionally watch a marathon? Did some cowboy cop tie you to a chair, prop your eyelids open with toothpicks, and leave the TV set to CBS on Demand?
Danny is not what I’d call noble. The man hates when people he’s interviewing know their constitutional rights, after all.
And Frank’s nobility is rather pragmatic.
I haven’t seen enough episodes to form an opinion about her naivete. She sure is annoying, though.
I tried to like the show. I love police procedurals, Magnum PI, and CBS has generally made shows I like (except for Hawaii 5-0 remake, but that’s another thread). I have not watched it lately, so my opinions are based on season 1, and scattered viewing since.
But the family seems to epitomize nepotism, and “family first, everyone else a distant second” attitudes. In other cop shows, when there is a person in power who uses influence to show favorable treatment to a friend/family, or protect them from something, those people are usually shown with disdain. They are not the heroes of the show, they are roadblocks to our heroes getting the job done.
It is odd to see a show where the leads are the people you’ve always disliked in other shows, especially so on CBS.
Selleck’s Regan doesn’t seem to be ashamed of his abuse of power, he seems to relish it. A perk of the job.
I think you have it exactly backwards, at least as regards Frank Reagan. He goes out of his way not to use his position to benefit his kids, to such a degree that he gets criticized for it by Linda (Danny’s wife, the Amy Carlson character) when Danny is the victim of an obvious (to persons who know him) frame-up.
I don’t see much nepotism going on among the Reagan siblings, either. Danny is clearly harder on Jamie than he needs to be, and the majority of the times that either of the cops asks the Bridget Moynahan character for special help, she says, “No, and let me explain why the favor you asked was stupid not merely from MY point of view, but from yours as well.”
My wife watches the show while I catch up on my important ipad games. I only look up to watch it when they are eating dinner.
Since I only watch the dinner part, I’m always hoping that Nicki would choke on some mashed potatoes. It would be even better if one of the family members would yell at her to call one of her other self-riotous friends to save her sorry butt.
Just poking this recently dead thread rather than starting a new one: we just discovered BB on Hulu and are through the first season. Most of the above complaints are accurate but I still am completely enamored of the show, about 90% because of the hulking presence of Tom Selleck.
So it’s an old-school cop show, set in theme largely before the Hill Street Blues era when all cops were a mix of gritty scoundrels and corrupt thugs. Me, I’m a little tired of endless Gritty Realism rubbed in our faces week after week, show after show; of broken characters dragging themselves from one abyss to another; and especially of shows where “family” is a minor plot point to be exploited in the negative. I like that S2:E1 almost lampshaded the “Irish Catholic cop family” trope, once so common and now nicely freshened up.
No, it’s not super-complex. Yes, the four or so cops in this one family do sometimes seem to be the entire NYPD. But it’s a relatively gentle procedural/drama and it has many things right that I haven’t seen done right in a long time.
Or, as I described it to someone recently… Yes, it’s vanilla. But it’s a very, very good vanilla.
PS - it’s minor, but I like that Mark Snow did the theme and does most of the music, as he long ago wrote one of my favorite 30-second symphonies.
Good Post, Amateur Barbarian. At least to me; because it’s how I feel too. It’s a good light weight cop show. I never get it when people criticize a show because the main characters get all of the good the cases. It’s a show ABOUT THE MAIN CHARACTERS… WHO ARE COPS! In real life most cops don’t ever even fire their weapon on duty… but that’s not exactly fun to watch. I like it because it tries to portray family values and integrity. I was recently disappointed that Danny got a new boss that was written as the cliched tough but fair personality. When I want to see that I’ll watch Castle (and I don’t care for it too much there either! )
I am a cable cutter, and I bought the latest season for Blue Bloods on Amazon Streaming because my antenna doesn’t always pick up CBS too well.
I’ve never seen the show, but I was in an episode! Just for a couple of seconds, as a background extra, haha. All I can say is that Bridget Moynahan really is that beautiful in real life (and I was making her laugh, which of course I interpreted to mean that she loved me and wanted to make babies together), and it was pretty cool hanging out with Donnie Wahlberg (who was directing that episode) and Jenny McCarthy (who was hanging out with her fiance), although I didn’t get a chance to talk with them. Unfortunately, Tom wasn’t there that day.
But yes, when I watched the episode to find myself, haha, I realized it probably wasn’t a show I was going to watch again…
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