By Michael Pickard | Drama Quarterly | October 9, 2025
Boston Blue showrunners Brandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier on taking charge of this Blue Bloods spin-off, solving the puzzle of crime procedurals and the best note they’ve ever received from television network executives.
During over a decade working together in Hollywood writers Brandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier have been responsible for episodes of The Blacklist, SWAT and Alert: Missing Persons Unit – series that have aired on traditional US broadcasters such as NBC, CBS and Fox at a time when television has become dominated by streaming platforms.
Now these proud “network guys” are the criminal minds behind upcoming CBS procedural Boston Blue, a spin-off from the wildly successful cop drama Blue Bloods that ran on the same channel for 14 seasons until 2024.
The series sees Donnie Wahlberg reprise his role as NYPD officer Danny Reagan, who takes a position with Boston PD. Once in Boston, he is paired with detective Lena Silver, the eldest daughter of a prominent law enforcement family.
“We are very blessed and happy to be network guys in this current era,” Margolis tells DQ. “Certainly there’s not as much of it [US network TV] as there used to be, but I do think audiences have a taste for seasons that go longer than eight to 13 episodes – you see the way people found Suits on Netflix – so there is a comfort and familiarity to the model that audiences really enjoy.”
As writers, the duo also love the puzzle of “telling the same story differently every time.” He continues: “There’s a structure to broadcast procedurals that you stick to, it’s your roadmap. But it’s also how do you give somebody a familiar surprise every week where it feels like it’s of the same show but it’s a different journey, different case and a different emotional story. That’s the fun mental game we get to play with our writers when we’re putting things up on the board.”
It is certainly a challenge to follow Blue Bloods, the Tom Selleck-led series that ran for more than 290 episodes. It told the story of a multi-generational family of cops dedicated to law enforcement in New York City, with Selleck’s New York police commissioner Frank Reagan head of both the NYPD and the Reagan family.
Yet Margolis and Sonnier are taking everything in their stride. In the midst of production ahead of the show’s launch this month, they are overseeing the editing of episode six while filming continues on episode eight, prep begins on episode nine and the writing staff are breaking episode 16.
Produced by CBS Studios and Jerry Bruckheimer Television, the show’s first season – which debuts in the US on Friday, October 17 following its world premiere at Cannes television conference Mipcom on Sunday – will run to 20 episodes. Paramount Global Content Distribution is handling international sales.
Following Blue Bloods “is a lot easier than it would seem, because every story that we tell comes from character, and, yes, we do have a familiar character at the core of the show but he’s surrounded by a whole new cast of characters,” says Sonnier. “With that comes lots more stories that we could tell from different points of view and different lived experiences. The moment we sit down to start an episode, we start to think about, ‘Well, what are our character journeys, where are they right now and what are they going through?’ Then the world opens up to us. There’s really no chance that we’re gonna end up crossing over with the previous show.”
Even if the writers’ room might throw up a case or a twist that seems familiar, “we encourage ourselves to beat that, or find a way to subvert an expectation and try to give it a fresher angle,” Margolis adds. “More importantly, it really does come from character. Even though Danny Reagan has been on TV for 14 seasons already, there are new elements to his character that we get to explore on our show that allows us to go in new directions.”
The new setting, 200 miles north along the Atlantic coast, also gives the co-showrunners the chance to have fun with Danny and the rivalry between the two cities. A New Yorker himself, Margolis attended Boston University and has friends in the city.
“What’s super fun for us is that we get Danny Reagan, who is as New York as it gets, played by Donnie Wahlberg, who’s as Boston as it gets,” he says. “So there’s a really fun cultural fusion going on just within that one human that gives us a lot to explore and have fun with.”
But Boston Blue didn’t start out with Danny Reagan, or any association to Blue Bloods at all. A self-confessed Blue Bloods fan, Sonnier felt connected to the Reagans’ sense of justice, duty and responsibility. “But that family doesn’t look at all like mine,” he says. “I am Jewish, my children are biracial. I want to see me on TV, and that’s a very specific subset of America that we’re talking about. But aren’t we living in a world where people come together from all different faiths and from all different ethnicities and all different socio-economic backgrounds, and sit together around tables and have these conversations?”
Each episode of Blue Bloods would see the Reagans come together for Sunday dinner to discuss events in their lives and resolve conflicts. “So what if our Sunday dinner became something else, something that I do in my house, that he [Margolis] does in his house, and was a Shabbat dinner,” Sonnier continues. “What if the people around that table weren’t all the same religion and all the same race but had different lived experiences and different points of view on all of the same subjects that we’ve been discussing for years on Blue Bloods, on justice, on morality, on duty, on service. What does that look like when you bring all of those perspectives to the table? That’s really where it started.”
From there, they pitched the idea of an LAPD detective who moves to Boston to be closer to his estranged son, who is a police officer in the city and has built himself a surrogate family. That project, initially titled Jamaica Plain, after the Boston neighbourhood in which it was set, was picked up by CBS and Sonnier and Margolis opened a writers’ room to break down a further four stories to see where the show could go.
A call from their partners at Jerry Bruckheimer Television subsequently changed everything. With Blue Bloods on the way out, they were informed CBS had a “wild idea” and wondered whether the main character in Jamaica Plain could be replaced by Danny Reagan from Blue Bloods.
“We were like, ‘Don’t toy with us. If you want this show to become an expansion of Blue Bloods, yes please, we’ll do that,’” Margolis remembers. “It became clear CBS had an appetite to try to keep that universe alive and saw in our world an opportunity to do that.”
The link is Danny’s son Sean. As Blue Bloods ends, Sean’s future is uncertain, but Boston Blue begins with Sean (Mika Amonsen) already established in the Boston PD, a cop like his dad but away from the family spotlight.
“They let us run with it and that’s how Boston Blue became a thing,” Margolis says. “It’s the best note from a network you’ll ever get. ‘Would you like to stand on the shoulder of giants?’ Yeah, we could do that.”
The opportunity to create a Blue Bloods spin-off was cemented when Wahlberg shared his enthusiasm with the showrunners to continue Danny’s story on screen. He’s also an executive producer.
“We knew if we were satisfying him with stories and the choices we were making, that the fans would respond, because that is the thing that’s most important to him,” Margolis states. “He didn’t want to do it, just to do it. He would only participate if he felt like it was servicing the character and the legacy of the show. Him as a partner really does give us a lot of comfort that we’re heading down a good path.”
Sonnier describes Blue Bloods as a family drama wrapped in a police procedural – an approach he credits with ensuring the show could run for so many years. That the family in the series was at the forefront of the drama also meant viewers could feel “connected” to the people they were watching.
“We want to know what’s going on in their lives. We want to see them grow. For a procedural that gets very difficult when you’re just about cop work,” he says. “They made you feel like you wanted to be a family like them, while also juggling very intriguing police procedural stories and giving you a glimpse behind the curtain of police work. All of those things are what we hope to emulate, balancing multiple procedural stories that are intriguing and have twists, and also really living in that family drama and having a group of characters that you feel connected to and want to sit down at a table with once a week.”
New characters include Reverend Peters (Ernie Hudson), Boston district attorney Mae Silver (Gloria Reuben), Boston PD superintendent Sarah Silver (Maggie Lawson) and rookie cop Jonah Silver (Marcus Scribner) – a family tree that gets its own explanation in the pilot episode.
But it is Danny’s fast partnership with Reverend Peters’ granddaughter and Boston detective Lena Silver (Sonequa Martin-Green) that the writers are most excited about exploring, describing them as “two sides of the same coin.”
“It’s been refreshing to write a duo that don’t have to butt heads,” Sonnier says. “Instead, they come from a similar place. They both come from dynastic police families. They both have a sense of justice. They both have a true north that they follow, but they are from such opposite places as human beings – their races are different, their religions are different, the way they were brought up, it’s very different.
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“One of them has a strong matriarch (Mae Silver), the other a strong patriarch (Frank Reagan). Everything about them is opposite, yet they are such similar people. Watching how they come to the same conclusions, or build on each other’s conclusions from opposite places, is one of the things that we’re finding incredibly fun to write.”
They have also enjoyed reinventing Sean Reagan for the series. In Blue Bloods, he was always an outsider in a family of cops. Now he’s a rookie himself alongside Jonah, “so we get to see the patrol stories that they tell,” Sonnier says. “Also, for the first time, Danny Reagan is a father to a police officer, which he never was before. What does that mean? And what does that do to his perception of his own relationship with his father. It’s a fun way for us to explore new sides of a character who’s been around for a long time.”
Co-showrunning the series, Margolis and Sonnier take a “divide and conquer” approach to the seemingly endless duties that position comes with, often working on elements of different episodes at the same time.
“We just serve where help is needed, and a lot of that comes from having been a writing team for 10 years to the point where we’ve never turned in a document over a decade by one of us that the other person hasn’t looked at, so we’ve learned to trust that if one of us is off doing a thing, that the other person is has full faith in what they’re doing,” Margolis explains.
“I don’t need to check his work at this point; he doesn’t need to check mine. We both understand the vision of what the show is, and if there is a moment where we need to make sure we’re on the same page, we find time to talk. But showrunning is a job that’s too big for two people, let alone one writer, so it truly is a divide and conquer as often as necessary.”
When Boston Blue makes its debut, Margolis and Sonnier hope viewers connect with the show in the same way they did with Blue Bloods, both in terms of the family dynamics and the police investigations in every episode.
“We really hope that it’s not just for the Blue Bloods fans – we want them, and we love them. We are them, but we want a broader audience too,” Sonnier adds. “I finally get to see myself on TV, and I hope that other people find the show in that way also.”