Boston Blue had its highly anticipated premiere on Oct. 17. And fans of Blue Bloods saw plenty of familiarity in the new CBS series from creators Brandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier, between the central character of Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) and a number of cameos. But "the Brandons" also brought one key Reagan component from New York to Boston: Family dinner.
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Sonnier, who was a major fan of Blue Bloods and has a law enforcement family of his own, wrote Boston Blue from his family’s perspective, but he also borrowed the idea of the famous setting. Each week, Boston Blue’s Silver clan, which includes Danny’s partner, Det. Lena Silver's (Sonequa Martin-Green) Mom, Boston District Attorney Mae Silver (Gloria Reuben); Lena’s sister Police Superintendent Sarah Silver (Maggie Lawson); her brother, rookie cop Jonah Silver (Marcus Scribner); and her grandfather, renowned Baptist pastor Reverend Edwin Peters (Ernie Hudson), will all gather for Shabbat dinner.
“I converted to Judaism,” Sonnier explains in an exclusive interview with Parade. “We were writing this around the time that my oldest son was having his bar mitzvah. In my family, we celebrate and have 'forever Shabbat.' We come together as a family and have Shabbat dinner and do the blessings on Friday nights. And so, part of watching Blue Bloods and seeing that Sunday dinner – I was raised Catholic before I converted – and I was like, ‘Oh, I understand that.’ And now here’s our version.”
Read on more on the Boston Blue family dinner and how the series came to be, including the recasting of Sean Reagan.
Related: Donnie Wahlberg Reveals How Danny Reagan Moved from ‘Blue Bloods’ to ‘Boston Blue’ (Exclusive)
The Silver family is Jewish, and they celebrate Shabbat. But then on Sunday, they go to their grandfather’s church. Talk about blending those two things.Brandon Sonnier: Isn’t there a whole world of people that feel connected to the family coming together? And what if we could make it about the family coming together in a slightly different way, in a new way, but also just make it clear that you don’t have to let go of what you had in the past to embrace what is the now and the future.And so, Reverend Peters understands Shabbat, though he is still a Baptist minister. And Mae and the rest of the family can go to a church service because it’s their grandfather who’s giving a great lesson in morals and justice and family and faith, that doesn’t have to be exclusive of their Judaism.Hopefully, the statement is that we can all come together. It’s about gathering at the table, or gathering at the church, or gathering wherever you gather and having those conversations, not necessarily about what the answers are or what the fight is. It’s about the conversation.
Will it be every week like it was on Blue Bloods?Brandon Sonnier: We will have Shabbat every week. I have Shabbat in my house every week.
It’s my understanding that you presented this to CBS as a cop story, but it wasn’t with Donnie. Talk about the idea of then incorporating him and having the Reagans and the Silvers together.Brandon Sonnier: The show initiated with a pitch that we had, in a similar space to Blue Bloods, just as a genre that we enjoy. I love Blue Bloods. And one of the things that we love so much about that show is that it is a family drama that is wrapped up in a police procedural. We’ve done cop shows for our whole career, but I have four children, he’s got two children. We also live a lot of family drama in our lives. And so, we wanted to tell a story about a family of police – and not all police, law enforcement, truly, we have a district attorney in our family. We also have a local reverend in our family, because the story was kind of this interracial, interfaith family in Boston with a police officer from Los Angeles, which is where we both live, who comes in to follow his estranged son. So, it was a slightly different setup.And as that story started to evolve and as we got deeper into that story, it was Jerry Bruckheimer Company and CBS, who said, “There’s an opportunity here, would you consider making the police officer Danny Reagan? Could this be a story in which Danny Reagan is the police officer who comes in?” And we said, “Yes, please.” That’s maybe the best note we’ve ever gotten in our entire career.Brandon Margolis: And the truth is, we had to ask more questions because our story was, again, about a cop following his estranged son, who was a police officer in Boston. And when we left Blue Bloods, Danny had sons, but neither one of them were cops. So, we had to ask the question, “Well, does the story still make sense if one of his sons joined a police force outside of New York?” And they said “yes.” So that’s really when we were like, “Okay, there is enough connective tissue and we could play this forward and see what happens if this man from such an iconic family as the Reagans suddenly becomes a transplant, and what do those stories look like.”And from there, it was a matter of calibrating the Silver family, who was always the same family members as they were, but just reimagining it through the lens of Blue Bloods. And that’s where we landed on having a weekly dinner and having some of those familiar surprises as we hope they come across.
Donnie WahlbergPhoto: John Paul Filo/CBS
So, Danny comes to Boston for a very legitimate reason, but then how do you justify him staying? He has Baez, this new relationship, back in New York. He has his family. He loves his job. And then he just picks up and moves to Boston to be with his son?Brandon Margolis: For us, it’s more than just being with his son. And this line really came from Donnie himself. It’s that being a Reagan on a police force means having other Reagans there. And he’s realizing that his own relationship with his father, as contentious as it may have been at times, allowed him to succeed because he had somebody there supporting him, and he realizes Sean, quite figuratively, is hurt without him, without anybody around. And he sees his son in his most vulnerable moment and recognizes there’s an opportunity for him to be there for his son on the job. And he’s realizing that he’s been part of an iconic law enforcement family for years, but he’s never been a father to an officer before. This is new for him.And to see his son almost killed in a fashion that really spoke to how his wife Linda passed and some of that previous trauma awoke in him this paternal urge to be there. It is about their relationship, and it is about bonding, but it’s also to try to protect his son from the job the way his dad and his grandfather had done for him.
Related: Everything to Know About Blue Bloods Spinoff Boston Blue
Talking about Sean, you recast. Talk about the decision to bring in a different actor to play the role.Brandon Margolis: We loved Andrew’s [Terraciano] work. We’ve seen him grow up on Blue Bloods. But for us, it made a lot of sense that if we were to start embarking on a new chapter of Sean’s life and taking on this new direction, that the energy of a different performer felt organic to the story we were telling. We were open to all sorts of ideas. But when we saw Mika’s audition, he had a lot of heart and soul in his performance and also reminded us of Andrew in a lot of ways that made it a fairly easy decision for us to see what he could do.
Mika Amonsen as Sean ReaganPhoto: Seacia Pavao/CBS
Having watched a lot of episodes of The Rookie, I know that rookies have training officers. So here we are in Boston, but these two rookies are together.Brandon Sonnier: Yes, it’s funny, we went back and forth. There is a version of the second episode that has a long explanation about there was a period of time in which they did have training officers, and they were going to start their first day… basically, we skipped the boring part.The exposition scene in which we learned that they had done some training and now because of their heroics in the first episode, they got a special dispensation to go ahead and start. Now that Sean is back on duty, there is an explanation out there, and we cut that part for you.Brandon Margolis: Yeah, maybe in an extended cut.Brandon Sonnier: We went with the exciting parts. Maybe in the extended director’s cut, we’ll get to see that scene where we explain how they did that.
Talk about your goal for the first season. What is it that you hope to achieve?Brandon Margolis: You know, a couple of things. I think first and foremost, we really want America to have the chance to meet the Silver family and to see in them a group of people that they want to sit around the table with once a week the way they did with the Reagans for years and years. So much of what Donnie’s experience in the real world has been of people coming up to him and saying, whether they were law enforcement families or not, that they saw themselves on that screen because of the family and the bonds that they had.So, for us, we really did want to put that theory to the test and show another family that had a universal connection the way that the Reagans did to see just a different table that people could sit at once a week.Brandon Sonnier: I think the goal is to honor the legacy from Blue Bloods, but to evolve it in a way for a new time and a broader audience.
You’re mostly filming in Toronto?Brandon Sonnier: I’m wearing my Fenway hoodie right now. We are filming mostly in Toronto with trips to Boston. We want to honor that city. We do want the show to live and breathe Boston, so we get to Boston as much as we can. But yes, our stages are in Toronto.
Boston Blue airs Friday nights at 10 p.m. ET/PT on CBS. Streams next day on Paramount+.
Next, ‘Boston Blue’ Showrunners Explain Shocking ‘Blue Bloods’ Cameo and Future Crossover Plans.
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