Blue Bloods isn’t just another cop procedural (if anything, that’s what the creators were fervently against creating); it’s a series built on layers of narrative that stretch far beyond the crime of the week. At its heart are the Reagan family, who serve as our entry point into every corner of New York City’s justice system: from beat cops and detectives, to the DA’s office, the political minefield of the Commissioner’s office with the Governor, Mayor and the delicate balance of managing 35,000 NYPD officers
Created by Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess, writers and executive producers of The Sopranos, I can’t help but think of the framework of this show as an almost parallel universe inversion of The Sopranos. Where The Sopranos explored the criminal underworld through the family at its centre, Blue Bloods offers the flipside to that coin: the family is the law, navigating both justice and morality in a city that constantly tests both.
The challenge of creating a promo for a show this layered, and ten episodes worth, is finding a throughline that can act as a narrative spine, allowing the promo to have structure whilst allowing material from various episodes to shine through, to excite the audience to tune in.
There was a theme through the episodes around the grey area that the police encounter. Selleck’s Francis Reagan makes a great point at the family dinner that all of them, in their respective jobs, have ‘the book’, but it’s their job to interpret that book with the realities of the situation to make a true and fair judgment. In addition to this, there was a need to include a reference to Donny Wahlberg’s Danny mourning the death of his wife.
