The final episode of the hit police procedural “Blue Bloods” gave fans a chance to say goodbye to the Reagan family after 14 seasons, but showrunner Kevin Wade opened up about why the series didn’t give any of the family members a definitive ending.
“I never planned out an ending … I looked at, and by [that] I mean we, looked at what we felt were successful series finales for long running shows, comedies and dramas,” Wade told Deadline of writing the show’s poignant ending. “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.”
He explained that the best series finales leave their audiences with the feeling that the story will continue beyond the last episode. “Anything you see in the last five minutes; we’re inviting you to imagine the show after the show is no longer on,” Wade noted.
The TV boss highlighted HBO hit “The Sopranos,” 1970s sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and war comedy-drama “M*A*S*H” as examples of beloved finales that gave audiences the freedom to envision the post-series world of those shows.
Blue Bloods aimed to give the Reagans a satisfying ending
Kevin Wade explained to Deadline that they tried hard to give audiences the feeling that the world of “Blue Bloods” would keep turning beyond the series finale. “I don’t know that we got there,” the executive producer said. “But we were aiming high in that sense.”
“I think the job is always to deliver entertainment,” he added. “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.”
The creative previously spoke to TV Insider about giving the family an ending that felt emotionally complete without being truly final. The approach was meant to highlight the fact that real life isn’t always as neat as it can sometimes be portrayed — and that giving audiences an ending with true finality would rob them of the show’s longtime commitment to realism.
“Happy’s a pretty subjective term. I think there’s a satisfying ending for all the Reagans. It’s a family individually and collectively who deal with loss and loneliness and good versus bad,” Wade explained. “You know, the sun doesn’t come out and all the stuff that they deal with goes away, that would not be true to 14 years of storytelling. But our hope is that [it’s] satisfying for the audience.”