Ponderosa on the Hudson: The Parables of Blue Bloods

[Valin]

National Review:

It’s an up-to-the-minute police show that’s rooted in eternal verities.

Michael Auslin

February 6, 2016

 

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Now in its sixth season, CBS’s Blue Bloods seems at first glance to have little to do with television’s latest renaissance. Compared with Sons of Anarchy or Boardwalk Empire, it feels like a throwback to the 1950s. Its plots overwhelmingly unfold in one episode, with only one or two story lines having stretched longer. By species, it is related more to Dragnet than to The Wire, more Adam-12 than True Detective.

 

In spirit, though, Blue Bloods is really an urban western, reviving a genre that defined television drama from its infancy through the early 1970s. The story of the Reagans, an Irish Catholic family of New York City cops, Blue Bloods is Ponderosa on the Hudson. However, it is not a straightforward police procedural, like the venerable Law and Order empire. Rather, it is a morality play. It eschews the moral ambiguity that cable shows are steeped in, focusing instead on a catechism of good and evil.

 

The core of Blue Bloods is family — both the Reagans, who serve as the central characters, and the larger New York Police Department. In the world of Blue Bloods, family is not just an important, but the most important unit in society. This is a very traditional, if not anti-modern, idea. In the show, the identity of an individual is inseparable from his family ties, whether of blood or shield. One is judged by how one acts within and towards family, and personal strengths are employed in no small part for the sake of family, or to uphold its values. Conversely, an individual’s fate is largely preordained when he is part of a family that has chosen evil, such as the Sanfino crime family from the series’ second season, or falls in with dangerous surrogate families, such as the ubiquitous gangs.

 

As a band of brothers (and sisters), NYPD members are a close second to blood relatives. The demands of the family that is the police fraternity often burden the real husbands, wives, and children of its members, but its bonds are, in a sense, more powerful, as partners on the job face life and death daily in a way that families rarely do. Perhaps just as important, the NYPD is among the very few institutions in society that appear truly color-blind, living up to the loftiest ideals of the American creed, and in which the content of one’s character far outweighs the color of one’s skin, at least in the world of Blue Bloods.

 

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