Summary
Boston Blue bends over backwards to reassure Blue Bloods fans in Episode 1, which could be to its detriment down the line, but in the meantime, it’s perfectly serviceable and family fare.
Halfway between the continuation of Blue Bloods and the introduction of a completely new show, the premiere of Boston Blue has that classic “same but different” quality you probably expect from a spin-off to a beloved procedural. Episode 1, “Faith and Family”, takes both of those concepts incredibly seriously, reintroducing several members of the Reagan clan, most notably Danny, and also the entirety of the Silvers, Boston’s most pre-eminent law enforcement dynasty.
The links between the families are made obvious from the very beginning. Sean Reagan, now working for the Boston PD, is on a night out with a fellow rookie named Jonah Silver when both respond to a fire in a nearby office building. They both spot a woman who has been shot dead and left to burn up in the fire, but an explosion leads to Sean being hospitalised, summoning Danny all the way from New York to be by his side.
Jonah is the youngest member of the Silver family. When Danny arrives in Boston, meets Jonah, and starts interfering in the case, he’s immediately partnered up with Detective Lena Silver, Jonah’s older sister. The family matriarch, Mae, is the District Attorney, and Detective Superintendent Sarah Silver is the daughter of Mae’s late husband, Ben, a circuit judge who was murdered outside the courthouse, meaning Sarah and Jonah have the same father, while Lena and Jonah share the same mother. Mae’s father, meanwhile, is Reverend Edwin Peters, a cool Baptist preacher, though Lena, Mae, Sarah, and Jonah are all Jewish, which doesn’t go unmentioned.
Phew!
Anyway, the dead lady whose murder the fire was supposed to obscure is Andrea Decker, the CEO of a company responsible for the facial recognition software that the Boston PD uses – software that is under some degree of scrutiny for allegedly misidentifying people of colour. Clues quickly lead Danny and Lena to a PI named Carlos Delgado, who alerts them to some disgruntled employees who were recently let go by Decker’s company. One of them, Marquis Rollins, confesses to the murder as soon as he’s interrupted packing his bags, but it’s all a little too easy for the veteran law enforcement officers to be convinced.
At about the midpoint of Boston Blue Episode 1, Danny’s sister Erin arrives on the scene, partly to check on Sean but also, it seems, to help Danny move through Boston’s social circles. She accompanies him to a family dinner with the Silvers, which is where most of the exposition about the family occurs, and it’s almost a reassuring moment for the audience that this show will, at its most fundamental level, be just like Blue Bloods, but in a different city. It’s like the characters are realising it in real time.
Decker’s killer turns out to be Caleb Bruce, the son of Marquis’s ex-girlfriend. You know the type – good kid with plenty of potential, but an incarcerated biological father filling his head full of nonsense. I don’t love how “Faith and Family” contrives a too-happy conclusion from all of this, with leniency here and software consultancy there, but I do like that it was Jonah who got the collar. Score one for the rookie.
Of course, the premiere ends with Sean beginning to wake up, right after Danny had reiterated that he would be staying in Boston for the foreseeable future. The show’s predictable like that, and a bit too pleased with itself and its own superiority for my tastes, but it might lose some of that as we go. Either way, it’s a comfortably familiar return to the world of Blue Bloods, reintroducing a handful of familiar faces, even if some only qualify as cameos, and introducing a whole other clan to get accustomed to. Their immediate similarities and fuzzy fondness for each other don’t ring entirely true, at least not yet, but there’s no reason to be concerned with the spin-off’s underlying quality or direction. Again, at least not yet.
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