BLUE BLOODS showrunner Kevin Wade explained how he and his team took cues from past series finales to write a final episode that is memorable and does justice to the show.
“I rewatched the series finales of great shows, going back to M*A*S*H and CHEERS and MARY TYLER MOORE, and certainly THE SOPRANOS… I watched a lot of them for what they might have in common,” Wade told TV Line. “What they basically had in common, if I boiled it down, is they did a great show, and then in the last few minutes they did a little pivot towards, ‘This is also the last show.’”
“[They] avoided the ‘We are now going to do a retrospective of how great we’ve been,’” Wade continued. “Because I think people tune in just to see a really good episode of the who that they have loved.”
The BLUE BLOODS finale will focus on the Reagan family and highlight the way they complement each other — something that has made the show special throughout its 14 seasons and an approach they have applied to season finales in the past.
“To me, the BLUE BLOODS season finales that worked best were where we found a crime or criminals or a situation for all the Reagans to work together on – separately but together,” Wade said. “And we did that [for the series finale]. We have four different stories but all are aimed at solving or preventing the same crimes.”
As the show wraps up, the showrunners also included storylines that they felt would only work in the final episodes of the show, rather than as long-running plot points to be developed in later seasons.
“I mean, if you’re on [TV] for 14 years, in at least four or five of those years you started out a season going, ‘This could be the last one,’ just as a numbers game,” Wade explained. “So, I’ve thought about [these last-minute elements] a lot along with my colleagues. [Executive producer] Siobhan Byrne O’Connor and I would talk about it a lot over the seasons.”
The second half of BLUE BLOODS’ final season premieres on Friday, Oct. 18.
While the mainline BLUE BLOODS series is coming to a close this fall, some actors from the show are already hinting that their characters may return to the screen very soon.
“We filmed the apparent last season of BLUE BLOODS, and it’ll air starting in October,” Donnie Wahlberg said last month. “Maybe there’ll be something else after that. I don’t know anything officially yet, but there’s things in the works. So maybe something awesome will happen.”
Movieguide® previously reported:
Eagerly awaiting the final installment of BLUE BLOODS’ 14th season? Here’s everything you need to know.
BLUE BLOODS Season 14 Part 2 will premiere on Friday, Oct. 18 at 10/9c on CBS, with episodes available for next-day streaming on Paramount+. There are eight episodes in the fourteenth season’s second part, with all major cast members returning.
So, what can fans of the show expect from the final episodes?
“We always have tried to strip away another layer of the characters,” showrunner Kevin Wade told TV Insider, adding that the procedural nature of the show means “the only changes we can make are in the characters and their actual fears.”
He continued, “I’m trying to write the best stories to put two or more Reagans in opposition to each other and try to resolve it at the end. And hopefully, in the resolution, they reveal something new about themselves.”