Blue Bloods: "Allegiance" (Panda Productions, CBS-TV, aired February 25, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Endgame I switched channels and watched a Blue Bloods episode called “Allegiance,” which in spite of being weighed down by the three-storyline plot structure is by far the most literate and intelligent police show on TV next to Dick Wolf’s Law and Order multi-series. The show’s central conceit that one Irish-American family, the Reagans, has made the New York Police Department essentially a family business (the current police commissioner is the son of the former police commissioner, and virtually his entire family, including his in-laws as well as his kids, are also on the force or otherwise involved in law enforcement as assistant district attorneys) gets a bit tiresome and hard to take, but overall this show is well-written and well-acted. Tom Selleck, the series star, is one of those actors who’s got better dramatically as his looks have faded; I never thought he was all that sexy (unlike my late partner John Gabrish, who had a huge poster of Tom Selleck as Magnum, P.I. on his door when I first tricked with him), but I was sorry that John G. died seven years before Selleck made a film, In & Out, in which he played a Gay man. The show dealt with various plot lines, including the on-air murder of a female talk-show host who looked on her way to becoming the next Oprah or Ellen; a police officer who is shot in his own apartment over his son’s involvement with drug gangs; and a plot line in which a cop who’s a part of the Reagan family overhears a conversation between a woman he’s tricking with and her employer, a corrupt attorney who’s using her to keep a witness from testfyinig against one of his Mobbed-up clients.

Eventually it turns out that the surprisingly unattractive husband of the glamorous talk-show host hired her personal assistant to kill her by spiking her coffee with something containing nuts, to which she was allergic (the cops also interview a former assistant who had written a tell-all book about her time with the host’s show, ahd who had tried to blackmail her into paying her a lot of money not to publish the book; they arrest her for blackmail but realize she had nothing to do with the murder). Police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck) gives the veteran cop an ultimatum – either make his drug-addicted and gang-connected son move out or turn in his badge and gun. The police rescue the girlfriend of the cop just as she’s being kidnapped by the gang who want to keep her from testifying, and a running character who’s the wife of one of the Reagans on the force takes the police sergeant’s exam and aces it, but then decides he really doesn’t want to be a sergeant after all because he still wants to work cases “live” instead of being stuck behind a desk. Blue Bloods is a nicely written show – though the producers have tied themselves in knots by linking themselves into the three-storylines-per-episode format and I think the show would be better if each episode focused on one crime the way Dick Wolf and his producers and show runners have.