The cancellation of Blue Bloods still feels like a crime to Tom Selleck.
Two years after the long-running CBS police procedural came to an end, the show’s star reflected on the “frustrating” drama surrounding the final season in the latest episode of Ted Danson’s podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name.
“Blue Bloods was a labor of love… I think for everybody,” said Selleck, who played New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan, the patriarch of a law-enforcing family including NYPD detective son Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), sergeant son Jamie (Will Estes), and district attorney daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan).
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After more than a decade together, the actors portraying the fictional Reagans bonded like real family. And they wanted it to stay that way.
The cast was so dedicated to coming back for a 14th season that they, as well as the production team, all took a sizeable pay cut to lower the show’s budget and enable more episodes.
“The real truth to that is in the last year of [Blue Bloods], at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back. We’d already taken a 25 percent cut in salary,” Selleck revealed. “We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going.”
But ultimately, it wasn’t enough, and CBS announced its cancellation in November 2023. The final 14th season was split into two parts, concluding in December 2024.
“It was very frustrating because… out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television, Blue Bloods was number six in our fifteenth year,” Selleck explained. “Nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get. It may be some kind of record to have the same cast intact for that length of time. Usually if it wasn’t a family, it would be different, but you know, you couldn’t very well replace Jamie or Danny or anybody with another actor.”
Selleck, who previously starred on Magnum, P.I., Las Vegas, and Friends, acknowledged how rare it is in television for a cast to actually enjoy working together.
“Maybe people don’t realize, but a lot of shows become miserable to work on,” he admitted to Danson, who spent 11 seasons on Cheers. “You get a lot of egos and ‘I’m not coming out of my dressing room until he’s coming out’… and it’s miserable. Blue Bloods was never that.”
The Reagans haven’t left TV screens altogether — Boston Blue, a CBS spinoff starring Wahlberg’s Danny after he relocates from New York City, premiered in October 2025. During the first season, several Blue Bloods favorites reprised their roles, including Moynahan and Len Cariou, who portrayed Danny’s grandfather Henry Reagan.
The second season of Boston Blue premieres on Oct. 9.