The most Catholic show on network television has its finale tonight, 14 years and 283 episodes after its premiere in September 2010. Blue blood enjoyed extraordinary success at a time when network television was experiencing viewership losses.

Blue blood is not just a police drama. It is a family drama about a police family. Tom Selleck plays Francis (Frank) Xavier Reagan, the Irish Catholic police commissioner of New York City. He is widowed and lives with his widowed father, Henry Reagan, who also served as an NYPD commissioner and is now retired. Frank has three sons, all New York police officers, although corrupt police officers killed the eldest before the start of the series. His daughter is an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. Law enforcement is a family affair.

There have been other family crime series that focused on either the police or the robbers. But Blue blood is a show about a practicing Catholic family. They go to mass every Sunday and then have dinner with the family. Each episode includes the Sunday dinner scene, the most distinctive and popular part of the series. The Reagans don’t start until they say the table prayers before dinner. This makes them the only family on network television that prays regularly.

There are many other Catholic aspects to the show. Frank confesses and consults regularly with the Archbishop of New York. Key scenes often take place in churches. There were the obligatory storylines about the seal of the confessional, including one of the best confessional dialogues ever filmed, prompted by Frank’s request to a priest to help him find a kidnapped child.

The clan’s patriarch, Henry Reagan, accuses his son of trying to get a priest to break the seal, no matter the emergency.

“You did something shameful,” Henry tells Frank, one NYPD officer to another. “And you know it.”

“Put yourself in Father Phil’s shoes,” Henry continues. “He has earned the right to protect the seal.”

“How?” Frank asks.

“You confess your sins. You say your three Hail Marys. On the way out you throw some change into the poor box. But the priest, he remains with your sins. He takes on your sins. He’s praying for you.”

“He praised it,” says Frank.

“Yes, and he has nothing but smiles and good humor for the cheating husband and his innocent family when he sees them in church on Sunday after mass,” explains Henry. “The Cost a priest – sometimes all sinners, sometimes every year.”

For such reasons, Bill Donohue of the Catholic Civil Rights League—usually taking offense in the business—wrote in 2011, when the show was returned for a second season, that it was “one of the few TV shows on the broadcast networks” to promote Catholicism treat fairly” and that “the family-oriented program often sheds a good light on Catholicism.” I am pleased that the Catholic-friendly program is being renewed.”

Blue blood portrays a typical Catholic family as it is, not an idealized version. Given that the vast majority of Catholics do not attend Sunday Mass, this is more of an idealized version. Otherwise, the family struggles with all the problems that the culture brings with it. Daughter Erin is divorced. Danny, the older surviving son, struggles with faith in the face of tragedy. Jamie, the other son, thinks about whether he should get married in the church (which he eventually does).

Along the way there are a lot of struggles about how to do the right thing when you spend a lot of energy trying to catch people doing the wrong thing. Blue blood This is more about how police work is done correctly than about catching the perpetrators. Investigative techniques, legal procedures, political priorities, media passions, racial tensions, excessive force, corruption – all are viewed in light of moral character and the obligations of honor, duty, religion and faith.

There were occasions when the offending ones were annoyed by this. In 2014, Frank dealt with the case of a gay police officer in a storyline and confessed that he believed the church was “behind the times” on issues of homosexuality, even though he himself “liked the Latin Mass.” Donohue looked into the case and “wondered whether CBS was pandering to its audience.”

“We were bombarded with complaints,” Donohue said. “The audience for Blue blood has been carefully cultivated, so the price of alienating its base is high. Time will tell.”

Time did. Blue blood remained on the air for another 10 years.

The Catholicism of the Reagan family was a necessary corrective to a church culture that too often places moral law above the worship of God, as if the fifth and sixth commandments were more important than the third. The police know a lot about violations of the Fifth and Sixth, so observance of the Third – Keep Holy the Lord’s Day – is important.

Aside from their unusually devout worship, the Reagans are a reflection of U.S. Catholics as a whole, who overwhelmingly believe that Catholic teaching on homosexuality is outdated. That doesn’t make the doctrine wrong, just unpopular. It means that a family that disagrees is part of the American Catholic landscape.

Danny Reagan is played by Donnie Wahlberg, perhaps not coincidentally from a family that is notoriously Catholic in a complicated way. Mark Wahlberg’s career has ranged from real-life racial violence and on-screen profanity to the Hallow prayer app. Jim Wahlberg just made a film about the Eucharist, Jesus is thirsty. Donnie himself leads a public life that sometimes conflicts with Catholic teaching. The TV Reagans aren’t nearly as wild as the real-life Wahlbergs, but the message is similar: Catholic family life is complicated.

Reagan’s family life is unusual in one respect, especially for network television. The main characters Henry, Frank and Danny are all widower fathers. It’s a show that’s unusually about men, about fatherhood, about good men striving to live authentic masculine virtue. In the early seasons, Frank was credited with possible love interests, but as the series matured, the show went in the opposite direction. Married Danny joined his widowed father and grandfather when his wife was murdered.

In a 2020 phone interview with executive producer and writer Kevin Wade – a self-described practicing Catholic – I asked about the focus on men and male characters. Was this a conscious focus at a time when the crisis of masculinity has become a cultural, political and economic problem?

Wade objected. Rather, he said, there is power in “storytelling about people who are so committed to their public service that their personal lives suffer.” After speaking to some priests about the show, it’s a sacrifice.”

Perhaps that is why Frank Reagan had a long friendship with the New York archbishop, with whom he shared a remarkable bond. The police commissioner is primarily concerned with subordinates and rivals; The archbishop is something like a peer. In the final season, they take to the streets together incognito – as does Theodore Roosevelt, New York’s first police commissioner – and fear that they have lost credibility as leaders among their respective flocks.

Some of the most powerful episodes revolved around fatherhood, faith and forgiveness. Frank, who had to cope with the murder of his son by corrupt police officers in his own department, knows his loss. He goes to the bedside of a dying gangster to apologize for his own role in the deaths of his wife and grandson. And after Frank has repented, he invites the gangster to confess – not to Frank, but to a priest he has brought with him to prepare the gang boss for eternity.

Another rival is an activist black pastor who stirs up racial animosity against the commissioner. The priest’s son is murdered and Frank offers him the compassion of a father who knows what it means to suffer at one’s own hands. Reconciliation comes when the priest invites Frank to give a eulogy at the funeral.

What will Frank say? What he wanted to say at his own son’s funeral, but he didn’t have the strength at the time. He quotes Aeschylus in Agamemnon:

“And even in sleep the pain that cannot be forgotten falls drop by drop on our hearts, and in our own despair, against our will, wisdom comes through the terrible grace of God.”

For 14 years, with the grace of God, the Reagans endured the rigors of police work on Friday nights. A community of spectators joined them in the midst of cultural crises of faith, fatherhood and brotherhood to join a Catholic family that found strength and comfort every Sunday in the Lord’s house and at the dinner table.