I enjoy the show, but the entire family gets together every Sunday for dinner? The grandchildren don’t have other grandparents who would like to see them? There are no aunts, uncles or cousins to visit? It seems strange, but my husband and I moved away from our hometowns 40 years ago and almost never eat with family, so what do I know.
They are portrayed as an old-fashioned Irish family. They all go to church together, they all eat Sunday dinner together. They are not supposed to be a typical modern family.
We watch the show, but it doesn’t stop me from constantly making fun of it:
- The price of hair dye for Selleck’s hair and mustache must be hundreds of dollars per episode. There isn’t a human being in Asia or Africa who has hair color darker than his.
- Every single member of the family is crucial to NYC - the city Selleck considers “my city”. As I have mentioned, all that is missing is their pet one-eyed, three-legged German Shepard called Boomer who used to be a bomb sniffing dog.
- Aside from eating food that would put most people in ICU, they are chugging down beer and Scotch like there is no tomorrow. They should be doing an Irish jig every night.
- They have the most well-behaved, thoughtful children in Manhattan. Exactly what form of electrode-shock therapy are the nuns using at those Catholic grade schools they attend?
- There hasn’t been a major crime/terrorist plot in NYC where there hasn’t been a family member 20 feet from the scene at the moment it happens - wouldn’t that be suspect over time?
I’m so happy to find there is someone else who can enjoy shows and still mock them!
I know a family in the neighborhood that has supper together every Friday night. Not every family makes it every time, but most Friday nights, they’re all together. The grandkids are teenagers, and I believe they’ve been doing it since the first kid got married. Another family (my cousins) gets together every other Tuesday night for supper.
I’ll grant you that it’s unusual, but it’s not unheard of.
Neither family, however, has members that happen to be walking by random terrorism events. 
My brother and his family typically go to my sister-in-law’s parents’ house for dinner Saturdays and his parents’ house on Sundays. So it is possible.
In theory I think it’s wonderful. It make me think of Norman Rockwell and big happy families. As I mentioned, my husband and I left Chicago about 40 years ago and missed all this.
In practice I think some Sunday’s I’d just want to go to a movie and eat Chinese food and it would annoy me.
I guess I’m never happy.
Maybe they should be Mormons. But, it’s TV. It’s fiction. It’s not a reality show.
I watched it for awhile, but it’s really just the same as all the cop shows. The only one I’m watching now is Hawaii Five-0. Just as formulaic, but better scenery.
This show is hokum but very enjoyable. I haven’t caught it from the start. I have one question about it. The younger cop son who works undercover, how come he works undercover and on the beat?
He was at a party of some type and saved a guy from a drug overdose. Turned out to be the son in the gangster family. Reported the contact through his chain of command and they asked him to keep in touch with the family.
But how is he able to be a beat cop and an undercover one or is he pretending to be a crooked cop?
I read post #8 without seeing the username, and was just about to quote it and say: Those are exactly my thoughts!
Then I saw the username.
I like this show, but I can’t stand cute little rookie cop brother so I just tune out when it’s about him. I also enjoy teasing my mom about her decades long crush on Tom Selleck.
I kinda want granddaughter to hurry up and finish high school and have all her idealized cop dreams crushed. Or for the men in the family to pull protective big strong man and tell her she can’t be a beat cop because it’s too dangerous.
I’ve missed a lot of episodes - do we know how Commissioner [del]Gordon[/del] Selleck’s wife died yet?
Only seen a few episodes, so maybe this has changed, but Tom Selleck’s character has the weirdest non-presence presence on the show. Everything seems to revolve around his character but he actually does very little. He sometimes waxes philosophically about the case du jour with his family or staff, argues with his father and says something profound at the dinner table. That’s about it. I don’t think I’ve seen an episode where his input significantly helped whatever case his children where trying to solve.
The gang has no idea he’s a cop. He’s using phony ID. Does his 40 hours on the beat and goes undercover in his spare time I guess.