Blue Bloods: "Old Friends" (Panda Productions, Paw in Your Face Productions, CBS-TV, originally aired January 76, 2022; rerun May 20, 2022)

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

Last night at 9 I turned on CBS-TV for an episode of the police procedural Blue Bloods, which my husband Charles doesn’t like because he thinks it’s just a rah-rah show cheering the New York Police Department (and, by extension, police departments everywhere in the U.S.) and ignoring the very real history of police abuses in this country, especially of people of color. I think the show is a lot more complicated than that, and this episode – a rerun from last January called “Old Friends” – was considerably more nuanced and emotionally complex. The main intrigue was the attempts of the New York Police Department and a gung-ho visiting cop from the Texas Rangers (how many people know that the Texas Rangers actually still exist?) named Garrett Moore (Gregory Jbara, an interesting last name for an actor who does such a good job playing the good ol’ Southern white boy, albeit the grizzled elder version of same), who comes to New York to avenge the murder of his partner by hired assassin Juan Carlos Lopez (Joseph Raymond Lucero). Lopez killed Moore’s partner back in Texas and apparently cut him up first, since when he finally corners Moore he threatens to do the same to him until the NYPD detective assigned to partner him, Danny Reagan (former New Kid on the Block Donnie Wahlberg, Mark Wahlberg’s older brother) deduces where he’s gone and arrives in the nick of time to save Moore.

Then he has to talk Moore out of killing Lopez and instead arrests the killer, not only because he can’t countenance the idea of a cop outright murdering a suspect but because they need Lopez to tell them when and where a major drug shipment from the Zaragosa cartel, which Lopez works for, is scheduled to arrive. They worm the information out of him by waving a vial in front of his face and telling him it’s heroin mixed with fentanyl, until he finally breaks down rather than get killed by that lethal combination. Later the two cops joke that the vial only contained powdered sugar from the doughnuts they’d been sharing. (Powdered sugar is frequently used as a prop substitute for drugs in movies and TV shows, as well as a “live” drag act I went to once at the LGBT Community Center.) Blue Bloods features the three-story format (I wish they’d follow the original format Dick Wolf used in his policiers, Law and Order and Law and Order: Sp;ecial Victims Unit, of having a single crime be their through line, but that’s become decidedly unfashionable in modern-day TV writing and even Wolf has had to do obeisance to the Great God SERIAL in his latest show, Law and Order: Organized Crime), and the other two stories are about a retired cop who gets busted for working at a bar that’s acftually a front for a bookmaking operation, in which among other things he’s become an “enforcer” for one of the bookies.

The idealistic sergeant who learns of this, Danny’s younger brother Jamie Reagan (Will Estes), reports the ex-cop turned bookie enforcer to his superiors and gets an enormous push-back, being told it’s shameful for him to trash the reputation of a good cop just because of his current job – especially since it turns out that the reason he turned to crime was because he needed far more money than his police pension could afford to keep his wife in the nursing home sne needs to take care of her medical issues. The third plot line is in some ways the most interesting, and certainly the most surprising given this show’s reputation as a rah-rah celebration of police work: a white cop, Christopher Zeal (Josh Crotty) – one wonders if writer Ian Biederman deliberately gave him that last name to underline the irony – and a Black cop, Paul Salter (Jamal James), get into a brawl at a bar. The fight was over the demand of a lot of people of color to “defund the police,” in which Zeal unequivocally opposes and Salter rather gingerly suggests might have some validity in that at least some of the money that currently funds the NYPD might be better spent doing more positive crime prevention programs instead. Officer Zeal reacts to Officer Salter’s presumed apostasy by belting him one, and when the matter comes to the attention of current police commissioner Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, a far better actor than he was when he was still a hot stud – he didn’t do much for me but my late partner John Gabrish had a life-size poster of Selleck in his Magnum, P.I. role on his bedroom wall when we first started dating), father of Danny and Josh (and, it seems, a blood relative of virtually the entire New York police force, the conceit that got this show called Blue Bloods and is in fact one of the most embarrassing things about it), he orders Officer Zeal suspended.

This earns him major opposition not only from the rank-and-file officers in his department, who are angry with him for defending a Black officer who admitted that increasing police funding is not necessarily the best way to fight crime, but the city’s mayor, Peter Chase (Dylan Walsh), as well. Mayor Chase goes so far as to write an op-ed for the New York Times denouncing his police commissioner and saying point-blank that Officer Zeal was correct in his actions. Frank Reagan and the mayor have the sort of talking-past-each-other argument you might expect, in which the mayor says that polls indicate that crime is the number one concern of New York City voters and residents, tourists and business owners (particularly of businesses catering to tourists) don’t like the idea of defunding the police and are fearful of what that could mean to their safety. He raises the spectre of the reputation New York got in the 1970’s and what that did to the city’s reputation as a tourist attraction. Commissioner Reagan equally insists that Officer Zeal broke the regulations governing police behavior and needed to be punished for it because, no matter what you think of the argument between him and Officer Salter, he has to enforce the regulations even-handedly throughout the entire department.

This part of this Blue Bloods episode got an interesting anonymous review on imdb.com that read, “Voltaire's famous statement defending free speech [‘I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’] is often repeated, but Commissioner Reagan demonstrated what that statement means in practice. He was defending an off-duty Officer expressing a view he disagrees with (defunding the police).” As I said at the outset of this post, Blue Bloods has been unfairly stigmatized as a rah-rah show cheering law enforcement, when in fact it’s a considerably more complex show than that, artistically and morally. Not only does it feature a police commissioner who defended a Black officer against a white one in an argument about defunding (at peast partially) the police, it also features a Texas Ranger who nearly gets killed for taking the law into his own hands and even has to be restrained from killing his partner’s alleged murderer after the man has already been arrested and is officually in custody.