‘Boston Blue’ review: Donnie Wahlberg’s ‘Blue Bloods’ spinoff gets the job done
Sometimes, the best thing a show can do is deliver exactly what the viewers want — nothing more, nothing less. And that’s just what CBS does with Boston Blue, the new spinoff of its long-running, much-loved drama, Blue Bloods. For fourteen seasons, the latter served up reliable crime procedural storytelling where family was the meat and catching bad guys the potatoes. Now, Boston Blue continues in that tradition by transplanting Donnie Wahlberg’s Detective Danny Reagan from New York to Boston, where he’s embraced by a new family of law-enforcement officers who, of course, gather for dinner each week.
When last we left Danny’s son Sean on Blue Bloods, he was a) played by Andrew Terraciano and b) graduating from NYU a year early and contemplating what to do next. Flash-forward an indeterminate amount of time, and Sean (now played by Mika Amonsen) is a little older and about to start his job as a rookie cop with the Boston Police Department. Boston Blue opens with Sean and his best friend from the academy, Jonah (Black-ish’s Marcus Scribner), hanging out in the city when they see an office tower on fire. Being heroes in training, the young men rush into the building to help the trapped employees escape — and discover a murder victim in the process. Late that night, Danny gets a call that Sean was hurt in the fire, and within hours, he’s on the scene in Boston, ready to solve the case while his son recuperates in the hospital.
As luck would have it, Danny has a lot in common with Detective Lena Silver (Sonequa Martin-Green), who’s working the arson/murder case for the Boston PD. Like Danny, Lena comes from a family filled with people dedicated to maintaining law and order: Her brother is Jonah, the freshly minted beat cop and Sean’s best friend; her mother, Mae (Gloria Reuben), is Boston’s District Attorney; and her sister, Sarah (Maggie Lawson), is BPD’s superintendent. And like Danny, Lena knows all too well how messy it can be to work a case when you share a surname with your boss and the city’s top attorney.
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Lena and Danny quickly settle into a comfortable rhythm — as does the show. Danny appreciates Lena’s willingness to let him work the case with her, even though he’s from the NYPD. And Lena appreciates that Danny is the only white male colleague who treats her with respect rather than mansplainy condescension. He pushes her to bend the rules, which he’s done so many times before back in New York. She reminds him that as a Black woman in a male-dominated profession, her work needs to be above reproach. He calls her “Beantown.” She calls him “Brooklyn.” Sure, it’s on the nose, but Wahlberg and Martin-Green seem to be having fun, so it works.
Both Boston Blue episodes CBS made available for review followed the if-it-ain’t-broke template that worked so well for Blue Bloods: The detectives work a high-profile case with multiple stakeholders, leading to a conflict with one or more family members. Ultimately, the crime is solved, and the Silvers gather around the table for a meal — in this case Shabbat dinner led by Mae and her father, Reverend Edwin Peters (Ernie Hudson) — and talk over the week’s events.
Yes, the Silvers are an interracial, interfaith family, a fact that makes Boston Blue orders of magnitude more progressive than its predecessor. But diehard Bloods fans shouldn’t worry: Showrunners Brandon Sonnier and Brandon Margolis (The Blacklist) aren’t trying to radicalize the franchise — maybe just evolve it a bit. And by “a bit,” I mean that Boston Blue acknowledges that race and racism — especially in policing — exists. The initial case involves a facial recognition software used by the Department that’s been accused of being “biased towards minorities.” In the second episode, Danny teases Lena about “the pot calling the kettle black,” and she shuts him down with a joke of her own: “I’m not sure how, but I think that’s racist.”
The latter exchange exemplifies why Boston Blue works best when Wahlberg and Martin-Green are driving the action with their easy, buddy-cop chemistry. The series’ other cop duo is Jonah and Sean, who are paired up by the Department on day one, because you gotta give the people what they want. Scribner and Amonsen don’t have quite the comfortable swagger of their senior co-stars, but both are likable performers who will grow into their roles. And what a nice treat it is see the glorious Reuben (who, fun fact, played a different character on two episodes of Blue Bloods in 2021) back in a lead role on network TV. Striding through the halls of power sporting chic suits and a retro-glam bob, Mae the matriarch is to Tom Selleck’s Frank as Boston Blue is to Blue Bloods: A little kinder and gentler, but fully capable of getting the job done. Grade: B+