'Blue Bloods' prepares to end, but will there ever be a spinoff?

"Blue Bloods" — which begins airing its final eight episodes Friday (WCBS/2, 10 p.m.) — will wrap for good in December. Kevin Wade, meanwhile, has already moved on. The veteran playwright and screenwriter who's run the show these past 14 seasons, will publish a crime novel in January ("Johnny Careless") and is already working on a sequel.

But the sequel he is not thinking about — or prequel, for that matter — is the TV one that millions of fans so clearly want. When "Blue Bloods" ends, it will end for good, which won't (of course) stop all the speculation about "franchise extensions" a la "Law & Order" or "NCIS." Those might happen one of these days (or years). Wade's message to all those eternal optimists out there: Just don't hold your breath.

Newsday recently spoke with this longtime North Shore resident about this bittersweet ending.

When did you wrap production, and what's everyone been doing since then?

It was June 28 and we threw ourselves a cast party on a hotel rooftop in Brooklyn. For myself, I started a prequel to the novel I wrote during the [writers'] strike. [Otherwise] the [TV production] business is in a state of stasis. People on our crew who would normally have been on the next job the day after or after July 4 are instead out of work. The business in New York is very slow — whether it's [because] of the post-pandemic, or strikes or other labor contracts that had to be worked out, it's just an extremely slow period right now. I talked to the head of the Teamsters local that covers all that and their motto [to members] is, '"Stay alive to 2025." It will come back but this period is a hangover from the last few years.
 

What about all these rumored "Blue Blood" franchise extensions we've been reading about in the trade press?

Right now there's nothing I know of in active development. And unlike other franchise-type shows with interchangeable casts with very good actors who have been in those roles for very long runs, "Blue Bloods" simply wasn't that kind of show like "Oh, 'Blue Bloods: Boston' or 'Blue Bloods: New Orleans.' " It was dependent on that wonderful cast and wonderful familial aspect to it.

I did wonder about an origin series, like, in fact, "NCIS Origins."

Well, "Young Indiana Jones" was a good idea on paper, but without Harrison Ford and his father Sean Connery? On paper and on-screen are sometimes very different animals. I'm sure there are much better examples, but that's the one that springs to mind. But the cumulative merit of "Blue Bloods" is so tied to the actors playing those parts. It's never about the bad guy of the week, or what jeopardy they were in. It was always between those characters played by those actors and would they hit a wall they couldn't walk back from?

Nevertheless, I do feel like there's some unfinished business here — and Tom Selleck (Frank Reagan) clearly feels the same way, in various comments he's made in recent months. Do you feel like "Blue Bloods" got a raw deal?

No [and] candidly every job I ever had has ended, it's the nature of the business. We were an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical [like] "Cats" or "Phantom." So I don't see this as unfair. I'm certainly aware of the fan base and its enormous enthusiasm and the letter-writing campaigns. I got letters full of blue confetti from "Cancel the Cancel" groups. But it's the nature of these things. Nothing lasts forever, and I'm happy with these eight shows coming up and that they are as good as they are. The first saying about show business that anyone learns — even those who don't go into show business — is always leave them wanting more.

Let's get to the brass tacks question: will there ever be a spinoff?

I truly don't know. That's above my pay grade and no one [at the network] has come to me. But the business is obviously changing [and] I don't know what the model for those [Hollywood] folks looks like going forward.

I don't want to get into spoiler territory, but I'm guessing the last episode will end around that iconic Sunday dinner table. Seems like a lot of beloved actors from 14 will have to squeeze around it.

Yes, I don't think it's spoiling anything to say that the art department had to order a new leaf for it. I will say that not anyone who wasn't there before will be there.

Again, no spoilers but can you sketch that end scene in the broadest of terms?

In the last act of the last show, we had the latitude to maybe tie something up — or project something into the future. [Producer] Siobhan Byrne O'Connor and I wrote it and we brought back things that could be considered loose ends. We didn't tie them up but do give the audience a sense of the direction that this fictional world would travel down [afterward].

I've often thought that the moral of '"Blue Bloods" is that there is a greater good in this fictional world which is often bedeviled by lesser goods, aka political or bureaucratic exigencies. Your postmortem?

I'll try not to make my answer self-serving because I was the showrunner, but if we tried to do something that the audience recognized, it was to take an emotional issue or political issue or crime issue and we didn't preach. If we ever had a polarizing issue [in a storyline] we tried to build a soap box of equal size for both sides. We never had anyone wagging their finger at the audience, and say 'this is how you act if you're a good person.' If I've learned anything about Long Islanders, they don't like to be lectured on what is or is not good behavior.