Pretty Much Everyone Agrees Blue Bloods Won't Survive Past Season 14
The show has outstayed its welcome.
Although TV shows are meant to last, some become smash hits and last much longer than anticipated. The danger with such super successful shows, though, is that producers will often drag them out well past their due date in a bid to squeeze every last bit of profit out of them.
That often leads to a noticeable drop in quality, with fans eventually abandoning such shows in droves.
It would appear that Blue Bloods may have fallen victim to this pattern. CBS's hit police procedural debuted back in 2010 when the TV landscape was vastly different, with streaming services only just beginning to enter the scene. Blue Bloods went on to run for an impressive thirteen consecutive seasons, captivating viewers with immersive character arcs. The show's just been renewed for a fourteenth season, but its production has been put on hold indefinitely because of the ongoing WAG-SAG-AFTRA strike. However, the consensus among the show's fans is that it's time to put this old dog out to pasture.
The biggest complaint viewers have about Blue Bloods is that its storytelling quality has fallen off a cliff. The plot now often feels contrived and tends to deviate from the show's original premise, focusing more on various supporting characters and their personal lives while ignoring the main cast. For example, the most recent thirteenth season was centred primarily around Eddie Janko-Reagan, a character only introduced in later seasons, who was constantly sticking her nose in other people's business while doing remarkably little police work.
In general, Blue Blood's narrative has become absurd and disjointed, with the show constantly jumping from one story to another, with little happening in any of them. And the biggest issue is that all these narratives developing in parallel seem to have little to do with each other. Many fans thus now feel the latest seasons are only undermining the reputation of a once-good show.
Given this state of affairs, the producers should probably end the series with season 14 if it ever materialises. Some sources say the cast and crews have even agreed to pay cuts to bring the show to a satisfying conclusion. Hopefully, the 14th season manages to tie up all the loose ends and give Blue Bloods the ending it deserves. Its release date hasn't been announced yet.