CBS Announces ‘Blue Bloods’ Series Finale Date — And There Will Be a Retrospective Special
Blue Bloods is nearing its end now that fans finally have a series finale air date.
CBS announced that Blue Bloods will end on Friday, December 13, after nearly 300 episodes. Before fans say goodbye to the show, they can celebrate the 14-season run by watching the retrospective special titled Blue Bloods: Celebrating a Family Legacy on Friday, November 29.
“I think that fans will feel somewhat satisfied,” cast member Bridget Moynahan told TVLine earlier this month about the final episode. “But then you’re going to want more. There are these nuggets where people are going to be like, ‘Yes!!!’ And then the show’s over. It’s going to be bittersweet in some ways.”
Blue Bloods: Celebrating a Family Legacy is a one-hour special that features new interviews with the cast and recurring guest stars as they share their favorite memories and behind-the-scenes moments from the past 14 years.
According to the synopsis, the retrospective promises “a rare look inside the famous family dinner scene, where viewers learn family dinner secrets straight from the Reagans’ table.” The special is expected to share new details about the first time the cast had family dinner during the pilot “when they were strangers.”
Blue Bloods, which premiered in 2010, follows the lives of the Reagan family, many of whom work for the NYPD under the leadership of NYC police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck). Frank’s father, Henry Reagan (Len Cariou), has also been central to the show alongside Frank’s children: daughter Erin Reagan (Moynahan) and sons Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) and Jamie Reagan (Will Estes).
Speculation that Blue Bloods would end started in 2023 when the police procedural was renewed as the cast and producers agreed to take a 25 percent pay cut. Wahlberg, 55, exclusively told Us Weekly in April 2023 that he hoped to see Blue Bloods achieve the same level of success as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
“I mean, Ice-T and Mariska Hargitay have been going for gosh, so many years, and we hope to last as long as they have,” he shared at the time. “One of the things I’ve done is I try to just stay very present in each episode and take each script that comes my way and say, ‘OK, what’s gonna happen now? You know, what am I doing this week?’ And kind of find the journey in that particular episode and not get caught up in what’s gonna happen next year, what’s gonna happen in two years.”
Wahlberg noted that he wasn’t opposed to the idea of a Blue Bloods spinoff, joking, “Danny and Erin become private investigators and move to Hawaii, but that was too close to [Selleck’s iconic 1980s series] Magnum, P.I., so we didn’t want to do that one.”
After news broke about Blue Bloods coming to an end, Selleck, 79, shared his hot take that the show should have remained on the air.
“I’m kind of frustrated,” he told TV Insider in October. “During those last eight shows, I haven’t wanted to talk about an ending for Blue Bloods but about it still being wildly successful.”
He continued: “I’m not going to turn into a bitter old guy saying, ‘Get off my lawn.’ I don’t believe in holding grudges, but if you were to say to the television network, ‘Here’s a show you can program in the worst time slot you got, and it is going to guarantee you winning Friday night for the next 15 years,’ it would be almost impossible to believe.”
Selleck admitted that his “frustration” came from the show always being “taken for granted because it performed from the get-go.”
“So, how do I feel?” he added. “It’s going to take a long time to sort all of this out. I remember after the weekend [of the final episode’s shoot], I said, ‘I’ve got to get to bed early tonight because I have to do my dialogue for Monday.’ Well, there was no Monday. It’s just going to take a while.”
