Despite overseeing 14 seasons of the long-running CBS hit police drama Blue Bloods, it turned out that showrunner Kevin Wade had more stories to tell about those who serve and protect thanks to the writers' strike, which forbade him from writing for TV or film.
Instead, he sat down in his writer's room at home and created the character of sharp-witted, down-to-earth, Long Island North Shore police chief Jeep Mullane. The first novel, Johnny Careless, was released in 2025. And today, One Good Eye is hitting bookshelves.
“If I were better at relaxing, I would have just gone with [the strike]. But I was 13 years into the run of Blue Bloods where I was used to writing 6-1/2 days a week, so I took a couple of weeks off and then thought, ‘You’ve got to do something,’” Wade tells Parade in an exclusive interview. “I'd always wanted to write a mystery novel, and I just sat down and started doing it.”
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Wade was familiar with mystery novels from all the reading he had done over the years, so he set his sights on paying homage to some of his favorite authors: John D. McDonald, Robert B. Parker,Raymond Chandler and Carl Hiaasen,
“All these guys culled from where they lived,” says Wade, who has predominantly lived on Long Island for the past 25 years. “The deadbeats, the heroes, the shysters, the con men, so I tried to do it that way, so I wrote about the North Shore of Long Island.”
Courtesy Celadon Books
The novel turned out to be a success and sold to Celadon Books, but it was a transition because writing a novel is very different than writing for TV or film.
“The hardest part of the transition was all my life I'd written plays and screenplays and then a lot of television, and I collaborated with directors and cinematographers and casting people and, most importantly, actors. And then all of a sudden I had none of them,” Wade explains. “Actors are so important because you're writing a character knowing that someone with charm and charisma and beauty and wit is going to turn it into a three-dimensional aspirational thing. The novel is your words on a page and that's it. There has to be some muscle to the language that wasn't really necessary in screenwriting.”
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Prior to joining Blue Bloods, Wade had famously written two rom-coms that always make the best of lists, Working Girl and Maid in Manhattan, both of which are thematically similar in the premise of have-nots striving to succeed and making it. Jeep Mullane similarly is the odd man out in a group of friends who are wealthy and he’s the blue-collar contingent.
“I don't if it's subconscious or unconscious, I've never tried to figure it out, but I've always been attracted to protagonists who essentially have their nose pressed to the glass and on the other side of the glass, it looks like a better life, and so they end up -- if they get in there at all -- it's by using their wits and not their bona fides. They're good at improv,” Wade says. “They know who they are. Usually in the middle of those stories, they lose who they are, and then in the end, they go, ‘I need to reclaim myself to get to the next step.’”
Kevin WadePhoto Credit: Michael Parmalee
It was Wade’s work on the film Mr. Baseball, which starred Tom Selleck, and the fact of having worked with Leonard Goldberg on Working Girl, that resulted in Wade’s being hired for Blue Bloods.
“They were there working on this new show Blue Bloods, and I was around, and someone asked me to come in and meet them,” Wade says. “The next day I started work there as a staff writer, and then I guess I had a feel for it. I got along very well with Leonard, and I was friends with Tom and got him, so I ended up running the show by the end of that first season.”
Fourteen seasons later, the show came to an end, even though it was still winning its Friday night timeslot on CBS and even though the cast and crew were gung-ho to continue making it. But Wade says you can’t argue with the moneymen.
“Everybody who wanted it to go on weren't budgeting it and paying for it,” he says. “There is that element that is unmovable. Briefly, the economics of a one-hour television show shot in New York with a large cast, lots of locations, and everybody gets more year to year — everybody negotiates whatever — and all the union crews, it's baked in. So the reason was – and I'm not saying I agree with it, I've just reporting to the reporter — that it just got too expensive.”
That said, CBS did replace Blue Bloods with Boston Blue, a show very similar and one that also has Donnie Wahlberg reprising his role as Danny Reagan, but Wade explains that after making 300 episodes of a police drama, it isn’t something he regularly watches.
“I watched the pilot, and I loved Donnie [Wahlberg] in it,” he says. “I don't really have a judgment. I did notice, and I was pleasantly surprised that family dinner was there and that the set design even included a similar table and sideboards. And as you moved in through the living room, a very similar fireplace with a very similar mantle. I thought, ‘OK, very well. I guess if you're going to steal from us, just put it out there.’ Good for you.”
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