Friday's New Lineup

The CW network has seen fit to ship Supernatural off to Fridays, so now I know how Smallville fans have been feeling for a while now -- it's just not a good night to watch a show. And Supernatural is a show that really shouldn't be watched during the day (for maximum effect), so that's going to be an awkward one to keep up with. But I did decide to give one new Friday show a shot.

Blue Bloods. This is part family drama, in the vein of Brother and Sisters or some such, part cop show. Three generations of one family with people in (or retired from) the New York Police Department fight crime... and each other. Or some cliché like that. That really was problem with the first episode -- it felt like an extreme cliché. Three siblings: one's a fresh on-the-beat cop, one's a jaded and hotheaded veteran, the third is a prosecuting attorney for the city. You really could get this kind of stuff from some kind of script-manufacturing computer program. (And in an early scene, I think maybe they actually did. The exposition was so thick you could spread it on your toast.)

But the thing that made it greater than the sum of its parts, both reading about it on paper and seeing it in execution, is a solid cast. Tom Selleck is the father of the family. Donnie Wahlberg (excellent in the short-lived series Boomtown) and Bridget Moynahan are two of his kids. His other kid and his father are played respectively by Will Estes and Len Cariou, two actors not recognizable by name, but who have both showed up over the years as leads in series that didn't fly, or guest stars on plenty of other series that have.

In short, it seems to me like if Blue Bloods can tip the balance more toward family drama in the future, this cast will carry it well and then the show will be something good. But this pilot tipped the balance very much toward police procedural, and a show like that would have to be very excellent indeed to hold my interest amid the dozens of others on TV. Hell, against the half-dozen others just on CBS alone!

So I suspect I'll give the show another episode or two. But how long I hang with it will very much depend on it improving before I get tired of playing "TV catchup" with it on the weekend.