Blue Bloods: "Where We Stand" (Panda Productions, CBS-TV, aired March 4, 2022)

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

Last night at 10 p.m. I watched the latest episode of Blue Bloods, a TV series I regard as the finest cop show next to the Dick Wolf Law and Order franchises even though the conceit that virtually the whole New York Police Department has been run by the Reagan family: Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, one of those actors who’s got to be a more impressive and deep performer once he lost his youthful good looks – not that I ever thought he was that good-looking, but my late partner John Gabrish had a life-sized poster of Selleck as Magnum, P.I. on his bedroom door the first time we made love: frankly, I think the current star of the Magnum, P.I. reboot, Jay Hernandez, is way sexier than Selleck ever was!), the current police commissioner; his father, Henry Reagan (Len “Sweeney Todd” Cariou); his son, Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg), the show’s lead detective; Danny’s wife Erin (Bridget Moynahan), an assistant district attorney; and various other Reagans both by blood and marriage who all seem to gravitate to law enforcement as a profession. (One wonders what they would have done with a Reagan who showed up at one of their Sunday dinners and said, “You know, I’m studying to be a flute player and that’s what I want to be with my life instead of being a cop.”)

About the only thing that irritates me about Blue Bloods are the multiple intersecting plot lines – I realized last night that my husband Charles actively dislikes the show and doesn’t want to be in the same room when I’m watching it (last night he disappeared into the bedroom so he could call his mother) – but apart from that Blue Bloods is one of the most fascinating and thought-provoking cop shows (a genre not usually described as “thought-provoking”). This episode,”Where We Stand,” opens with a long-haired man being prosecuted as a purse-snatcher. The chief witness against him is the police officer who busted hin, Anthony Abetemarco (Steven Schirripa), though the case against him is dismissed when the alleged victim back-tracks on her identification and now insists she wasn’t sure. When another woman gets assaulted by the same man, Anthony, who’s been tailing him, grabs him and we’re not sure what happened after that, except that the crook ends up falling down the stairs on the front stoop and is hospitalized with a fractured skull. While all this is going on, the police also break up a fight between an unarmed school safety officer and a 16-year-old guy who despite his youth already has a long criminal record as a drug dealer and a thug. What’s more, the students at the school are clearly on the side of the 16-year-old: they surround the kid and the cop as they’re beating up on each other and they chant a slogan, “No police on campus!”

Also the police are trying to find Christine Adams Farmer (Eunice Bae) and her daughter Emmy (Charlie Tassone – that’s right, a girl named Charlie), who are missing. Christine’s ex-husband Will Farmer (Andy Karl) seems to be a devoted if non-custodial dad to Emmy, but he’s bitter about how little he gets to see her because Christine has sole custody and he’s limited to visitation every other weekend. A co-worker of Christine’s recalls that when someone came to see her, Christine grew white literally and was scared to death of him. It turns out he’s a representative of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and unbeknownst to anybody in her circle Christine isn’t a U.S. citizen. Instead she was brought here at age 2 – we’re never told what country she and her parents emigrated from, though she looks more Asian than Central or South American – and she was sent several notices regarding her hearing date at which she would have an opportunity to show cause why she should not be deported. When she didn’t show up, a deportation order was issued against her. The cops run her down to a train station where she and Emmy are about to take a train to Montreal, which would mean she’d become a fugitive in the eyes of U.S. law and never be allowed back in this country. In the end it turns out that the reason she never attended the hearings is she never got them because Will stole the notices out of her mailbox in hopes she would get deported and he would get sole custody of Emma.

Meanwhile, the New York school administration takes notice of the situation involving the 16-year-old who beat up a cop to the students’ apparent satisfaction, and they send the school system’s vice-chancellor, Mrs. Devlin (Didi Conn, well past her prime but still a quite engaging figure), to intercede with the police commissioner. Commissioner Reagan decides to come out alone to the meeting at which they are going to discuss the situation, and in order to bolster the case for cops in schools despite the growing pressure from both students and their parents to get rid of them, by preparing a list of all the weapons, drugs and other contraband that particular officer had seized from that particular school. And there’s also a plot line involving Jamie Reagan (Will Estes), younger brother of Danny, who’s determined to stop his fellow officers from making racist cracks at a young Filipino cop even though the Filipino himself makes it clear he wishes Jamie would just butt out. I’m not sure why Charles has such a distaste for this show, but I really like it and think it’s one of the best shows on the air even though the multiple plot lines are confusing and the whole conceit that virtually all of New York’s law enforcement is being done just by one family is pretty strange.