SPOILER ALERT: This story contains details of tonight’s Blue Bloods series finale and Season 14 ender ‘End of Tour.’
“I’m handing you the keys,” a wounded New York Mayor Peter Chase (Dylan Walsh) says to NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) in the Blue Bloods series finale tonight as murderous gangs rage on the streets killing police, judges, and anyone else who gets in their way. “Get us out of this,” the often cunning politician tells the top cop he has so often clashed with over the long running CBS drama’s run.
“Tom Selleck’s character, Frank Reagan, had spent 14 years arguing with his boss, and there was an opportunity there for him to finally serve his boss in a way that also was true to his character,” explains Blue Bloods longtime showrunner Kevin Wade of the importance of the scene in “End of Tour,” the 293rd episode of the Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess created series. “Frank’s a cop. If something bad happens to you, he goes hunt down the guy who did it.”
Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan in Blue Bloods‘ final episode ‘End of Tour’
There is definitely a lot of hunting down in the Wade and the Siobhan Byrne O’Conor co-written Blue Bloods that aired tonight on CBS and Paramount+.
(L-R): Donnie Wahlberg as Danny Reagan, Bridget Moynahan as Erin Reagan Boyle, Marisa Ramirez as Maria Baez, and Steve Schirripa as Anthony Abetemarco.
United for once, the gangs are hunting down law enforcement and to save their own and the city they serve, as well as rescue s gang leader’s daughter, generations of Reagans, in the NYPD and the D.A.’s office, are hunting down the gangs.
A recap of the last Blue Bloods episode “End of Tour” can be found here.
At the same time, a new generation, some new love and some rekindled love is in the air.
For Sargent Jamie Reagan (Will Estes) and his wife Officer Eddie Janko-Reagan (Vanessa Ray), Frank’s oldest son Detective First Grade Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) and his professional partner Detective Marie Baez (Marisa Ramirez) and Assistant DA Erin Reagan (Bridget Moynahan) and her ex-husband Jack Boyle (Peter Hermann), the end is a new beginning in more ways than one.
Held back due to last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike, the 14th Season of Blue Bloods was announced as the last back in November 2023. Split into two parts for maximum impact with lobbying by Selleck and Wahlberg up to the very end for more, Season 14 premiered on February 16 for 10 episodes and then returned on October 18 for the final eight episodes concluding tonight.
Having spoken with Deadline on numerous occasions over past seasons, Wade sat down with me to discuss the finale, the end of Blue Bloods and the story he wanted to wrap it all up with. The executive producer, who has penned the likes of 1988’s Working Girl and Jennifer Lopez’s 2002 rom-com Maid in Manhattan over the decades, also explained why none of Blue Bloods main characters were killed off and if any spinoffs were in the mix down the line.
DEADLINE: So, 293 episodes and you didn’t kill anyone off in the end…
KEVIN WADE: We did kill someone off, but we didn’t want to kill off a main character.
DEADLINE:Sorry, I should have been specific about that.
WADE: No, no, it’s alright. But, yes, we did not kill off one of the Reagans.
DEADLINE: Why?
WADE: Dominic, because I thought the audience would have hated it, to be honest with you.
It’s a Friday night at 10 o’clock entertainment, and the people who watch it out between New York and Los Angeles, which is most of the audience, I don’t think they wanted a dead Henry or a dead Frank.
DEADLINE: I get that, but what did you want?
WADE: We wanted to have a big event that had all of them together in an emotional context. And in the pilot, it was Jamie graduating the police academy, and everyone gathered in Madison Square Garden. We couldn’t really do that again. You know, one of the one of the other things about doing this show, and where I felt it kind of lived, was that every victory had to come with a personal loss or defeat. So for all of them to have to attend the funeral of Eddie’s partner gave us that dimension, so it was engineered that way, but not killing off a Reagan – because I thought the audience would have gone: “Thanks a lot.”
(L-R) Blue Bloods EP Kevin Wade, Marisa Ramirez, Vanessa Ray, President & CEO, Paley Center for Media, Maureen Reidy, Tom Selleck, Len Cariou, Donnie Wahlberg and Bridget Moynahan on October 17, 2024 in NYC (Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)2
DEADLINE: Having said that with baby announcements, Frank in charge of the city after the Mayor’s shot, a long awaited relationship between Danny and Maria, a remarriage for Erin, plus gang warfare, let’s just say it was kind of everything and the kitchen sink, even as finales go…
WADE: You got it! Look, if you’re running for 14 years and almost 300 episodes, you have, by osmosis, an idea of what feels like it works in the editing room and feels like it works on Friday night at 10. So, it’s kind of the Greatest Hits without being silly about it, of what we do, of the kind of stories that we do for Frank, for Jamie, Danny, Jamie Aaron. The combining factor is the ones that we felt worked best and biggest as finales, had all of them pointed at the same case, dilemma, peril, jeopardy, whatever it was. We had talked about it a lot, especially Siobhan and I, and that’s what we came up with.
DEADLINE: Was this the ending you envisioned previously, the one you had planned?
WADE: I never planned out an ending, ending for a show called Blue Bloods. I looked at and by I mean, we looked at what we felt were successful series finales for long running shows, comedies and dramas, and it seemed to me that the thing that they pretty much had in common was not beating you over the head with this is the last one. What they did was they gave you a really good episode, obviously, with a tip of the hat from the start. Then, for, let’s say, the last five minutes of the show, wrapping it up with that sense of anything we do from here on is going to be in your imagination. Anything you see in the last five minutes; we’re inviting you to imagine the show after the show is no longer on. Sopranos did it in a very significant, mercurial way. Mary Tyler Moore Show did it in a fun and bring a tear to your eye way. M.A.S.H. did a combination of the two. So, it was really just trying to hit that. I don’t know that we got there, but we were aiming high in that sense.
DEADLINE: I noticed in your list there you did not mention the end of the second Newhart series, one of the greatest series finales ever, where he wakes up and is back as the character from the first series and it’s all been a dream.
WADE: (LAUGHS) I think they stole from Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint personally.
DEADLINE: Really?
WADE: You know Dominic the last, the last line of Portnoy’s Complaint is whatever the doctor, the analyst says now “perhaps to begin.”
DEADLINE: Exactly.
WADE: So, no Newhart. I think the job is always to deliver entertainment, to deliver those characters played by those actors doing the things that they do best and give the actors something to really chew on. And so that’s pretty much what we tried to do.
DEADLINE: With all that is left for the audience to chew on in the end, is there more to come?
WADE: It’s a fine question. Dominic. Look, Blue Bloods exist not as a lead character. It exists as long as it did and if people liked it because of the that family, that’s a lot of actors. Then going out from there, there’s Steve Schirripa and Marisa Ramirez and Greg Jbara, Bob Clohessy, Abigail Hawk, there were satellites that made the whole. You couldn’t just take one of them, place them in New Orleans and say, Blue Bloods New Orleans. So that was never an option. So in the ingredients in the kitchen for the finale, we didn’t try to do that, not purposefully or not not one way or the other. Simply believe me, that just was not on the horizon when we were doing it
DEADLINE:You and Siobhan have been doing this for years on the show in one form or another whatever. Obviously, the reality is the end of Blue Bloods happened for you months ago, as it’s happening for the public now. We’ve talked a lot over those years. There’s been a lot that’s happened. There was a pandemic. There’s been a great shift in the nation as itself in terms of the media industry, perceptions of police, to name a few. From where you are now, what does it all look like, the show and its conclusion?
WADE: Well, let’s see, personally, I miss it. The work was fun. It was galvanizing. It was steady.
DEADLINE: Three things that, if anybody in Hollywood can say that that’s a win, right?
WADE: Yeah, it was amongst, oh, let’s say 100 people or so who I’d see every day, 10 months out of the year for 14 years. You know, I was driving to work one day and did the math. That’s as if we entered PK together and graduated high school together. If you think back to your youth, if you had that stretch with the same class, it was astonishing, and you never forgot them, because you grew up in front of them. We didn’t grow up in front of each other. We were adults. But it’s there’s a lot of stuff there that I miss. You go from 100 people a day, 90 of them calling your boss to four people a day, none of them calling your boss. It’s a big transition.
One of the things looking at this, we were fortunate in one sense, and I don’t mean to be Pollyanna, we never received critical or awards attention in the 14 years we were on …
DEADLINE: I would differ with thar Kevin, at least from the perspective of one specific Deadline reporter,
WADE: (LAUGHS) Exactly, right. No, I’m not saying we didn’t get praise and we weren’t taken seriously by yourself and a handful of others, which we appreciated very much. But in the larger sense, because we were not looking at that scoreboard, we were just keeping what we were doing on the show for that that 12 or 10 million people a week who were watching, were enjoying. It was pretty simple to leave the rest of the world out because we weren’t being compared to anybody.
DEADLINE: To that, what do you think was the secret of Blue Bloods success year after year?
WADE: Dominic, you know, anything I say is going to sound self-serving. And I was taught early on don’t sound self-serving.
DEADLINE: After 14 seasons of one well watched show, you get a pass here.
WADE: Okay, then, here it is: I think that people appreciated the show didn’t have an agenda.
That’s the thing we worked hardest on, and it was something that could easily, in some hands, have slipped into preachiness. We didn’t take sides.
(L-R): Dylan Walsh as Mayor Chase and Tom Selleck as Frank Reagan
DEADLINE: Some saw the show as pretty Red State, you know that …
WADE: That may be, but if we had a motto, the motto was, if you’re going to build a soap box for one side of an issue, build a soap box of equal dimensions for the other side so that the audience could not feel like they were being preached to. So perhaps they could accept the show as a character driven story with different characters with different points of view.
DEADLINE: For that, the series finale, End of Tour, that you and Siobhan wrote, there’s a lot of emotion there, almost rom-com at certain beats, but a lot of blood, no pun intended — more than usual for the show, it seems. What was the decision to go out literally in a hail of bullets?
WADE: We knew the stakes were high. We knew it wasn’t going to be a chamber orchestra piece. It was going to be an opera, we had to go big or go home.
I saw a thing in the newspaper early on in this final season process where Haiti had gone into yet another eruption, because the gangs of Haiti had decided to band together. They’d been neighborhood by neighborhood in Port au Prince and other cities, and they switched it out, and they said, we’re all going to work together and we’re going to police the nation. And I thought, what if the gangs of New York did that? I talked about it with Siobhan a lot that that’s a central thing that you can flip in the very beginning of the show. Then make it so that all the agencies, all our main characters, have to work, have to band together if the bad guys all got together,
DEADLINE: There was a bit of one and done here, this series finale could have been a pilot in an alternative universe, no?
WADE: That is, I think, a terrific way to put it.
Tom Selleck’s character, Frank Reagan, had spent 14 years arguing with his boss, and there was an opportunity there for him to finally serve his boss in a way that also was true to his character. Frank’s a cop. If something bad happens to you, he goes hunt down the guy who did it.
I also thought, okay, well maybe this is the one time we could say that Jamie and that Eddie’s pregnant. Yeah. Certainly, for Peter Herman and Bridget working together again, it led to something. So, yes, in the rom com sense, I can’t shake the Key Exchange, Working Girl, Maid in Manhattan stuff, I guess I still end up there. Siobhan keeps it real, and I throw in that stuff.
DEADLINE: We had a bit of that with Wahlberg’s Danny and Marisa Ramirez’s Detective Baez going to get a pizza, but I was surprised she didn’t show up at the big reunion family dinner at the end?
WADE: Honestly, it didn’t really come to the forefront. Because at the end of their last scene together, there was a a hint of a whiff of a promise that they were going to leave that squad and go off to dinner and end up at one or the other’s house, yes. But it felt like a big leap, with only two minutes left, after 14 years, to introduce them like that at the dinner.
DEADLINE: Why?
WADE: We’ve done it in Season 8 with Jamie and Eddie, and it felt like we had plenty of tarmac to get there. This would have been a little too quick, I think. To me, it was just too fast. But that’s one of those things that I said before. Here’s what you can imagine in the future. If you love the show, feel free to draw it for yourself. We just left little, little crumbs there.
DEADLINE: No crumbs in that prayer at the end. A lot to chew on there…
WADE: Well, it was either end on a joke or a prayer. I went with the prayer.