Tom Selleck is speaking out again about how frustrated he was by Blue Bloods coming to an end — and offering more insight into the cast’s decision to cut their salaries in hopes of continuing to film the show.
“Blue Bloods was a labor of love, I think, for everybody,” Selleck, 81, said on a recent episode of Ted Danson’s “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast about the CBS police procedural drama, which ended in 2024 after a 14-season run.
Selleck called out the “frustrating” drama surrounding the final season.
“The real truth to that is in the last year of [Blue Bloods], at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back,” he noted. “We’d already taken a 25 percent cut in salary. We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going.”
Blue Bloods found a strong fan base when it premiered in 2010. After a 14-season run, viewers were not ready to say goodbye to New York Police Commissioner Frank Reagan (Selleck) and his children: Danny (Donnie Wahlberg), Erin (Bridget Moynahan) and Jamie (Will Estes).
CBS, however, had different plans when speculation grew that Blue Bloods could end despite the cast and producers agreeing to take a 25 percent pay cut. The final season, which was separated into two parts, aired in late 2024.
“It was very frustrating because out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television, Blue Bloods was No. 6 in our 15th year,” Selleck added. “Nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get.”
He continued: “It may be some kind of record to have the same cast intact for that length of time. Usually if it wasn’t a family, it would be different, but, you know, you couldn’t very well replace Jamie or Danny or anybody with another actor.”
Selleck was also proud of how close the cast had gotten, adding, “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 until he’s coming out’ … and it’s miserable. Blue Bloods was never that.”
The actor isn’t the only one to speak out about the lengths the cast went through. Wahlberg, 56, got honest earlier this year about how expensive it was to make Blue Bloods.
“With Blue Bloods, they came to us before the final year and said, ‘You need to take a 25 percent pay cut or we’re going off the air.’ And some people were like, ‘Nope.’ Other people were like, ‘OK,’” he shared in an April episode of the “George Janko Show” podcast.
Wahlberg, who now stars in the Boston Blue spinoff, tried to negotiate. “I was like, ‘Why not just say [a] 15 [percent pay cut] in exchange for four more seasons?’” he recalled. “Because they were like, ‘This is the last year, so 25 percent pay cut.’ I just was like, ‘Let’s keep it going. I’d rather have 75 percent of something than zero percent of zero.’”
