What To Know
- Boston Blue was initially developed as an original cop procedural.
- The creators, Brandon Sonnier and Brandon Margolis, aimed to blend family drama with police work, drawing inspiration from both Blue Bloods and their own diverse family experiences.
- The original idea for Boston Blue had a different setting.
Boston Blue wasn’t originally pitched as a Blue Bloods spinoff, according to the people who made it. However, they were trying to fill the void Blue Bloods would leave at CBS.
Boston Blue was created by Brandon Sonnier and Brandon Margolis, a.k.a. the Brandons. Cop shows are the Brandons’ bread and butter. Before Boston Blue, they created the Bad Boys spinoff, L.A.’s Finest. While that series was short-lived, the Brandons also worked together on The Blacklist, Alert: Missing Persons Unit, and CBS’s S.W.A.T.
They told the Television Academy that when they first learned Blue Bloods was ending, they were eager to approach the network with an idea for a new cop procedural, knowing that CBS viewers liked the genre.
Their idea was to have a Los Angeles-based police officer move to Boston to work with his son, a rookie cop at the Boston Police Department. Sound familiar? The network pitched its own twist on the idea.
“The idea was floated by CBS to Jerry Bruckheimer Television to us: ‘What if that cop from L.A. was actually Danny Reagan instead?’” Margolis said. “And we were like, ‘Are we allowed to do that? Because yeah, we would do that!’” Sonnier said it was the “best network note we’ve ever gotten.”
They wanted their new cop show to have a family angle, so reformulating it for Blue Bloods characters was a perfect fit.
“So much of Blue Bloods was about the family, the legacy, and being police officers, and Danny fit in that mold — but as a sibling or as a son, never as a father,” Margolis said. “So, this opened up a completely untapped mine of stories for Danny.”
Sonnier previously described Blue Bloods as “a family drama dressed up as a police procedural.” That’s what they were going for with Boston Blue, too. But part of the storyline is inspired by Sonnier’s family life, as it is by the fictional Reagans.
“This is the world that we live in,” Sonnier said of the mixed-faith Silver family. “We didn’t set out to artificially imbue any sort of integration into that world. I loved Blue Bloods, I watched Blue Bloods, but I also sit around a table with my white Jewish wife. I have children who are of mixed race, who are being raised Jewish.”
Boston Blue Season 1 showed Danny Reagan (Donnie Wahlberg) reconnecting with his son, Sean (Mika Amonsen), in Boston, but also forging a close bond with his new partner on the force, Detective Lena Silver (Sonequa Martin-Green). The identity of Lena’s biological father was a big mystery in the first season. With that now solved (Erik King plays her dad, Chris Williams) and a new half-sister in the mix, the family drama is deepening in Boston Blue Season 2.
Boston Blue, Season 2 Premiere, Fall 2026, CBS