Goodbye, 'Blue Bloods': Why Long Islanders loved this show

Anyone on a quest to understand why “Blue Bloods” has been so popular on Long Island these past 14 years must begin with Peter King, the former representative from the South Shore’s 3rd (later 2nd) District.

Almost as much groupie as fan, King, 80, has watched every episode multiple times — there are nearly 300 of them, by the way — and has also visited the set many times. Up until the show ended production late last spring, he was on a first-name basis with cast, crew and showrunners (“Great guys!”). When CBS announced the show’s end late last year — the final episode airs Friday at 10 p.m. — he was bereft. This wasn’t exactly a death in the family, but nevertheless a death of sorts. He’s still in mourning.

To ask King about his “Blue Bloods” devotion is to invite a rush of emotions alongside a rush of words. But sort through all of this and he lands on something highly specific to the place he’s called home for decades.

The show reflected the “quiet patriotism” of communities like “Seaford, Wantagh, Massapequa, which also reflect the spirit of the NYPD. How many times have cops been shot in the city, or an officer killed, and almost every storefront has a blue ribbon?”

Beyond Long Island, there are plenty of reasons why certain TV series, this one in particular, resonate with millions of viewers. A family-cop procedural with a particularly iconic paterfamilias at the center — Tom Selleck’s NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan — “Blue Bloods” has been in an obvious sense the oldest and most reliable form of television.

Law enforcement family

There was Frank, always above the political fray but inevitably a part of it, alongside sons and fellow cops Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), Jamie (Will Estes) and his wife Officer Eddie Janko-Reagan (Vanessa Ray). Sister Erin (Bridget Moynahan) was a Manhattan assistant district attorney, who spent a couple seasons mulling that run for DA. Joe Hill (Will Hochman), Frank’s grandson, also a cop, turned up late in the run.

Then, of course, there was Henry Reagan (Len Cariou), father of Frank, former commish himself, who sometimes (not always) resolved family squabbles about ethical quandaries or moral impasses with a sharp rhetorical one-off (“Which would you rather have knocking on your door, an imperfect cop or a perfect criminal?”)

If all this were comfort food, it’d be mashed potatoes and roast beef — hold the broccoli — alongside a couple of glasses of red wine like the ones served around that equally iconic Sunday dinner table every single episode.

Yet understanding the wellsprings of that unique bond with Long Islanders like King is a little more complicated.

In part, it’s one forged on mutual respect — and like Long Island native Rodney Dangerfield, Long Island hasn’t always gotten a lot of that in prime-time. Over these past 14 seasons the show has occasionally drifted out east from Stage 23, the home base in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — most recently Jackie Martling’s Bayville home in last season’s finale, or before that Young’s Farm and Planting Fields Arboretum in Upper Brookville.

There have been dozens of local name-checks, too, over the years, or those little grace notes stitched into the fabric of the show that prompt viewer nods of recognition or rapport.

A perfect example was Henry Reagan’s recent recollection of some point in the distant past when he drove out from the city to New Hyde Park to visit a girlfriend.

The upshot of that misty-eyed Sunday dinner story: He trashed the car, but “I married the girl and we had 47 happy years until I lost her . . .”

NYPD's special bond with Long Island

Yet the other part of this bond — arguably the deeper and most resonant part — is that the NYPD has assumed such a central role in the culture of Long Island for decades. That effectively began in 1962 after the department relaxed residency requirements and thousands of cops began heading out east to those new (and affordable) bedroom communities along the South Shore.

The NYPD’s former chief of detectives, Robert Boyce — who has worked for ABC News as a contributor and has his own unscripted series for Oxygen called “New York Homicide” — was raised in Bethpage, but now lives in Brooklyn and spends a lot of time on the North Fork. He says he gets back to the hometown often — or at least when he needs a haircut — and when he does, “I’ll be sitting there, and cop after cop after cop comes by.”

“I think Jimmy Breslin first said it — more cops live in Massapequa than work in Manhattan and he was probably right,” Boyce says. “But they’re also in Bethpage, Plainedge and all those [Nassau-Suffolk] border towns like Lindenhurst and West Babylon.”

Just about wherever you live in certain towns on the Island, from the border of Nassau and Queens to towns farther east, to towns like Ronkonkoma or Islip, Boyce says you’re probably familiar with someone like Danny, Jamie or Eddie. They’re like neighbors or friends, or at the very least you have a neighbor or friend who’s familiar with someone like them. There’s not even the usual six degrees of separation here, Boyce says, but just one or two — if any at all.

Steve Davis, the former NYPD deputy commissioner of public information for decades, now retired, says: “I live in Manhattan and have a place in Hamptons Bays, but when I grew up [in the NYPD] I was one of the few guys who lived in the city. Everyone else lived in Nassau or Suffolk and in those days I knew guys who drove in from Exit 61 [on the LIE] every single day and back every single evening.”

Davis and others say the ties that bound the NYPD to the Island deepened, then expanded, as cops in the NYPD jumped over to the Nassau or Suffolk police departments. (Davis’ son is now with the Suffolk County police.)

James Nuciforo, a 23-year veteran detective with the NYPD, also now retired, and the show’s longtime technical adviser, says “Blue Bloods” “absolutely” has close ties with Long Island for “a lot of reasons. If you’re from Long Island, you’re so close to New York City that you’re reading about it everyday, or chances are good you or someone you know or a family member works in the city who’s putting trust in the cops there. Also, a lot of cops on Long Island start their careers in the NYPD, live on the Island, and then when the opportunity arises — either because of better family life or better pay — they jump to Nassau or Suffolk [police departments]. It’s very, very common.”

(Incidentally, this, too, was incorporated in an episode last season when Danny’s former partner, Jackie Curatola (Jennifer Esposito), who became burned out in an early season, reappeared during the 13th as chief of police in a North Fork community.) 

Peter King: Being a cop is appreciated on this show

King, “Blue Blood’s” greatest fan, may well be the perfect example.

Born in Manhattan, raised in Sunnyside and St. Albans, Queens, his paternal grandparents immigrated to the city from Inishbofin, an island off the rugged coast of County Galway in Ireland. His father, Peter E. King, was a longtime NYPD officer who later ended up as a lieutenant in charge of physical training at the police academy. He also established the NYPD’s first ceremonial unit, which conducts funeral ceremonies honoring cops, including fallen ones.

The family moved out to Nassau when those residency requirements were relaxed but as King recalls, his father never got to enjoy retirement because he died in 1982 “as he was putting in his papers.”

Middle class now, the communities King once represented in Washington never quite forgot those working class roots they first set down in New York City. “The spirit of ‘Blue Bloods’ is that blue collar drive to keep your family safe, and to live in good neighborhoods, which is also the mentality that followed” families like the Kings when they also moved from “from the city to Nassau and Suffolk. They respect the job that cops do.”

He adds, “being a cop is a tough job that takes a lot out of you, and that’s not always appreciated, but it is on this show.”

“Blue Bloods’ ” showrunners have long insisted that they never set out to foist a Pollyanna NYPD on the viewing public, where the good guys were easily identified by the badge they wore. When the 250th episode arrived in 2022, Kevin Wade — showrunner from the earliest seasons — told Newsday, “There’s gratitude for showing respect for police as a profession, as human beings, when there are anti-police viewpoints, whether from politicians or the public, we try to build a soapbox of equal dimensions for that other side, too.”

In fact, Wade, King and others have long acknowledged that “Blue Bloods” did something no other cop show in TV history had ever exactly done before.

Probably the first sustained close-up of the NYPD arrived in 1958 with “Naked City.” From then on, there were quick strikes (“N.Y.P.D.” from 1967), big hits (“Kojak,” “NYPD Blue”) and undying franchises (the various “Law & Orders”).

Family was the show's secret sauce

But what “Blue Bloods” has had these past 14 years was cops and family. Family was the real secret to the sauce, or the greater among equals — the part of the formula that shaped stories, themes, morals and outcomes. Before this show, New York TV cops were most often lone wolves, or if they did have personal lives, those were essentially bound to some job-related pathology, like drinking, spousal abuse or depression. Well-balanced TV cops with stable family lives were simply unheard of, or at least something TV development execs couldn’t get their heads fully around.

Instead, family on “Blue Bloods” was a protective shield, a circling of the wagons, an escape from the streets, or “the Job.” Family was what made everything worthwhile, what made hard decisions palatable, or what provided light at the end of a long tunnel. Family was also what gathered around a dinner table every single Sunday night, as members bowed their collective heads in praise of a God who was seemingly otherwise MIA in every other cop show in the history of TV.

Henry Reagan, on a long-ago episode, captured this family-cop conflation succinctly: “Family is the only badge I’ve ever needed.”

Moreover, this particular TV family wasn’t simply a single generation one — the familiar nuclear type celebrated (or parodied) on TV almost since before there was a prime-time — but a four-generation family. This seasoned the dramatic arcs, so to speak, because generations tend to interpret events differently from one another, and squabble over them, too.

The Reagans were no different, but what was different was that no member ever took a position they couldn’t retreat from. The Reagans were all about compromise, but those compromises were necessarily hard-fought ones. The solution to an ethical or moral quandary of the sort they had to wrestle with couldn’t have been otherwise.

Mostly they understood each other because, to a large extent, they were one another: Cops doing a hard job that no one else could ever fully appreciate or understand unless they had walked the beat in their shoes.

'Frank Reagan always has his cops' backs'

From this perspective, what bound “Blue Bloods” to Long Island so closely then becomes even a little more obvious, says Robert Galgano, a longtime detective with the Nassau police who started his career with the NYPD.

A South Shore native, Galgano — who says his kids tell him “Dad, you’re the real life Sid” (Robert Clohessy’s Sid Gormley, special assistant to Selleck’s Frank Reagan) — ended a 30-year run at Mineola headquarters in 2022. It was then he was named “confidential assistant” to NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell. That job lasted a year until Sewell resigned in 2023.

Galgano has nothing to say about the short tenure, but admits the experience did give him an insight into how one hit show could tap so deeply into the zeitgeist — or at least that part of the zeitgeist along the South Shore of Long Island.

Certainly the show’s all-for-one, one-for-all family spirit is part of the reason, and so is the multigenerational one, he says (Galgano’s own two children are police officers).

But what the show has done especially well, he argues, is tap into something almost subliminal — something, in fact, that strikes a chord with viewers almost anywhere, regardless of their politics or profession.

This was a show custom-built for unsettled, divisive times, Galgano says.

“I’ve read the stuff about Selleck’s character crafted to look like Teddy Roosevelt — that common-sensical, patriarchal character that appeals to people, especially rank-and-file cops who I honestly believe are always looking for someone who’s going to have their backs, which [Frank Reagan] definitely exudes. That has a lot to do with the attraction of the show.”

“Blue Bloods” also “presents a common-sensical view. It’s not a conservative or liberal thing, but a common sense one which rings true with everybody.”

Plots and resolutions may be “simpler than the way it works” in real life, "but I guess that’s part of the entertainment.”

Will Galgano be sorry to see the show go? Like King, do you really even need to ask?