Blue Bloods: "Reality Check" (Panda Productions, Inc., CBS-TV, originally aired December 3, 2021)

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

Yesterday at 10 p.m. I watched another compelling rerun of the CBS-TV series Blue Bloods, “Reality Check,” which for some reason has got a reputation as an uncritical rah-rah celebration of police work even though it’s a good deal more complicated than that. The conceit of Blue Bloods that one family, the Reagans, has dominated New York law enforcement for decades – the current police commissioner is Frank Reagan (Tom Selleck, who as I’ve noted before really grew and matured as an actor once he lost his looks), the retired police commissioner is his dad, Henry Reagan (Len Cariou, the original Sweeney Todd in the 1974 premiere production of the Stephen Sondheim musical), and his sons Danny (Donnye Wahlberg)( and Jamie (Will Estes) are both cops, while his daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan) is a New York City prosecutor who in this episode is considering a run for district attorney. The political consultant she’s working with tells her that her decision to focus on her professional life to the exclusion of everything else, including her marriage (which broke up in divorce and her husband subsequently married someone else and had two children with her) will actually leave voters cold and she won’t win as long as she projects such a forbidding work-obsessed image. Erin plaintively protests that she’s “old-school,” and the consultant says, “If ‘old-school’ still won elections, that wouldn’t be a problem. But it doesn’t.”

Writers Siobhan Byrne O’Connor and Graham Thiel blend this plot line with the antagonism between Jamie’s wife Eddie (Vanessa Ray) – that’s right, a woman named Eddie – and the new police partner Jamie has assigned her, Luis Badillo (Ian Quinlan), whom she doesn’t like because she finds him too gung-ho, too macho and too reckless. In one scene, when they get called to a liquor store that’s being held up by three armed men, he insists on going in without waiting for backup and ultimately either kills or arrests the suspects, only Jamie chews him out for a course of conduct that could have put a lot more people at risk. It turns out that the detective is still grieving over the loss of his previous partner in action, and Jamie knows what that’s like because he too lost a partner on the job.

The third plot thread concerns a police informant, a cousin of the Reagans, who’s affiliated with the notorious “Treys” gang, who is supposed to be their money launderer but has lost a big chunk of their money – and not for the first time, either. The police, specifically Danny Reagan and Anthony Abatemarco (Steven R. Schimpa), wire him and arrange a meeting between him and Orlando Burns (Donny Burke), the hired killer the Treys have sent to “off” him if he doesn’t come up with the money – though when the informant does come up with the money (courtesy of the police, who have come up with the cash as part of a sting operation), the killer takes it but then tells the terrified informant that he may kill him anyway, just for fun. Only Anthony gets incensed when the informant tells the killer that he stole from his late grandmother to pay the Treys off the last time he owed them – including selling her prized women’s Rolex watch. (I didn’t know Rolex made watches for women, but I’m not really surprised.) Anthony actually starts beating up the poor guy right after the cops have confronted the Treys killer in a shoot-out and either kill or arrest the other members of the gang, and Danny has to pull him off.

The final plot concerns a decorated police officer who was forced to retire due to an injury sustained in the service, who forms an organization and starts putting out statements of sound clips from Frank Reagan taken wildly out of context and paired with video footage of riots and other disturbances, The idea behind the videos is to make Frank seem like way more of a hard-liner than he is, and in the process move him to the Right in terms of how he actually runs the department and in particular his use-of-force policies. As I’ve said before, Blue Bloods is considerably more complex than the simple rah-rah celebration of the police it’s frequently described (and denounced) as, and indeed it sometimes rivals the Law and Order franchise shows as nuanced depictions of law enforcement – even though the ultimate plot lines all too often follow the template of the good guy with guns foiling the bad guys with guns, and this feeds the mythos governing this society that enables both massacres like the ones in Buffalo and Uvalde and the ridiculous narrative being peddled about them by the Republican Party and the National Rifle Association.