Tom Selleck addressed the “very frustrating” end to “Blue Bloods,” saying the cast had already taken a 25% salary cut to keep it on the air despite it still ranking in sixth place in broadcast shows.
“They claim 14, but it was 15. We did 15 seasons, 293 episodes,” Selleck told Ted Danson on his “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast Wednesday. “’Blue Bloods’ was a labor of love for everybody.
“Maybe people don’t realize, but a lot of shows become miserable to work on. You get a lot of egos, and ‘I’m not coming out of my dressing room ‘til he’s coming out,’ and it’s miserable. It’s absolutely miserable.”
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But he said “Blue Bloods” was never like that.
Knowing that his character was the patriarch of the family on the show, he decided to “set an example.”
“Either way, everybody got it,” he continued, saying that, in the last year of the show, “at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back. We’d already taken a 25% cut in salary. We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going. But the show was, it was very frustrating ’cause ‘Blue Bloods’ was out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television, ‘Blue Bloods’ was No. 6 in our 15th year.”
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The 81-year-old actor reiterated that “nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get. It may be some kind of record to have the same cast intact for that length of time.”
The cast might have made different decisions if it wasn’t a family, “but, you know, you couldn’t very well replace Jamie [Will Estes] or Danny [Donnie Wahlberg] or anybody with another actor.”
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Two years ago, after shooting the final episode, Selleck told TV Insider he was “frustrated” about the show ending because it was still “wildly successful.”
“I’m not going to turn into a bitter old guy saying, ‘Get off my lawn!’ I don’t believe in holding grudges, but if you were to say to the television network, ‘Here’s a show you can program in the worst time slot you got, and it is going to guarantee you winning Friday night for the next 15 years,’ it would be almost impossible to believe,” he said at the time.
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He added that he felt “Blue Bloods” was “taken for granted because it performed from the get-go. So, how do I feel? It’s going to take a long time to sort all of this out. I remember after the weekend [of the final episode’s shoot], I said, ‘I’ve got to get to bed early tonight because I have to do my dialogue for Monday.’ Well, there was no Monday. It’s just going to take a while.”
Last year, Selleck doubted he would reprise his role on Wahlberg’s spin-off, “Boston Blue.”
“I don’t know if I would do ‘Boston Blue.’ That’s another show,” he told Hour Detroit in November. “I think it’s partly my lot in life to make sure ‘Blue Bloods’ has its place in television history, but I don’t think it’s my lot in life to keep playing Frank Reagan.”