Tom Selleck says the entire Blue Bloods cast planned to “stay on” before the show’s cancellation.
The series star, who played NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan from 2010 to 2024, shared in a recent appearance on Ted Danson‘s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast that the cast had “taken a 25% cut in salary” before the procedural came to an end after 14 seasons on CBS.
“Blue Bloods was a labor of love, I think for everybody. [Executive producer] Leonard Goldberg had a real hand at casting talent and he put together this group. Maybe people don’t realize, but a lot of shows become miserable to work on. You get a lot of egos, ‘I’m not coming out of my dressing room ‘til he’s coming out’ and it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable. Blue Bloods was never that,” Selleck, 81, said on the Wednesday, July 29 episode.
“I like to think it had something to do with, I knew I was going to be in a leadership position and Frank was the patriarch of the family so I thought, ‘Set an example.’ Either way, everybody got it,” he added. “And the real truth to that is, in the last year… at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back. We’d already taken a 25% cut in salary. We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going.”
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Despite Selleck’s hopes, CBS announced the decision to cancel Blue Bloods in November 2023. The final episode aired in December 2024. The ensemble cast also featured Bridget Moynahan, Donnie Wahlberg, and Will Estes, among others.
“It was very frustrating because Blue Bloods was, out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television, Blue Bloods was No. 6 in our 15th year,” he added. “Nobody wanted to leave, everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get.”
This isn’t the first time Selleck has spoken out about the conclusion of the CBS hit. Last fall, weeks after the premiere of spinoff Boston Blue, Selleck explained during an interview with Hour Detroit that he didn’t “know if I would do Boston Blue.” He also called the cancellation of Blue Bloods a “huge disappointment” and said he still doesn’t “know why CBS did it.”
“That’s another show,” Selleck said of the spinoff. “I think it’s partly my lot in life to make sure Blue Bloods has its place in television history, but I don’t think it’s my lot in life to keep playing Frank Reagan.”
Boston Blue follows Selleck’s on-screen son Wahlberg, 56, as his character Danny Reagan handles crime in Boston after a change of scenery. Fellow series lead Sonequa Martin-Green mentioned in an interview with Woman’s World that those on the spinoff have been “talking about Mr. Selleck for a long time.”
When asked who she’d choose to bring back of the existing Blue Bloods characters, Martin-Green said “[Selleck] is always getting asked and as Donnie always says, the door’s open.”
“We would love to have him and we will make sure the story is just right because Tom is so adamant about the story, as he should be and as we all should be,” she said. “I think it would be great if we can have him and I’m excited for whatever story it ends up being if he does come.”