Blue Bloods: "Guilt" (Panda Productions, CBS-TV, aired March 11, 2022)

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

I put on the TV show Blue Bloods at 10 p.m. on CBS. My husband Charles arrived home with dinner from Colima’s just as the show started, and he ended up in the kitchen while I hung out in the living room and watched it. The Blue Bloods episode was actually one of the dullest ones I’ve ever seen; it had been ballyhooed as their 250th show but the only thing truly special about it was the ending, in which (this being the last show before St. Patrick’s Day) the assembled Reagan family uttered this traditional Irish toast:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields
and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

Aside from that, it was a dull show with some of the most boring plot lines this show’s writers have ever come up with. As usual, the show had three interlocking stories. In one of them, a Gay couple, Jonathan (Michael Cyril Creighton) and Mitchell (André de Shields), are having running arguments with their neighbors, and when Mitchell ends up dead Jonathan accuses the neighbors of killing him after they allegedly poisoned Jonathan’s dog. Only in the end it turns out that Jonathan himself killed Mitchell after Mitchell had an affair on him (if I were Vladimir Putin I’d say he had “special physical operations” on him, except that Putin hates Gays and we’re among the many minorities who’ve ended up on his shit list). It also turned out that Mitchell had already died of a heart attack when Joniathan stabbed him, so the most serious crime Jonathan can be charged with is attempted murder.

There’s also a lot of boring byplay around the hospital where Angela Reddick (Ilfenesh Hadera), one of the few cops on the show who isn’t named “Reagan,” is recovering from being shot at after she insisted on quitting her desk job at One Police Plaza, headquarters of the New York Police Department, and going back into the field instead. Apparently all the folks at One Police Plaza, including various assorted Reagans, made her life miserable and drove her crazy with their ragging, which explains why the episode is called “Guilt,” and at the end she returns a transfer back to One Police Plaza but then (I think) turns it down again because he’s not sure the teasing won’t continue. And Anthony Abatemarto (Steven Schirripa), another of the few non-Reagan cops on this show – who nearly quit the police force to become a private security guard in the last episode – is recommended by the retiring chief of the investigations division to replace him, but pisses the guy off at his first meeting when, in the presence of the chief he’s supposed to replace, he’s junking the entire paperwork system the former chief had spent years creating because he doesn’t think police work is done on paper.

It wasn’t a terribly exciting episode and the conflicts were mostly internal police-department politics rather than the outside world. I’d have wanted to see more of the Gay couple, especially when in order to annoy their neighbors they start blasting away with show-tunes albums, specifically Barbra Streisand belting out “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl/ Now that sounds like something I would have done, only my choice of music would have been even weirder – like maybe Stan Kenton’s Wagner album, one of Yoko Ono's screaming records, or Pharoah Sanders’ Jewels of Thought!