Blue Bloods

This is a solid hour that feels perfectly attuned to the CBS lineup, although it's less formulaic than what you usually find on Fridays.

If it pulls off what it seems capable of doing, Blue Bloods should be both a good cop show and an evocative family drama. So something for everyone, just like a good Sunday dinner.

The best thing about Bloods, aside from the return of Selleck to weekly TV, is that it breaks with the nearly 20-year tradition of dark, gritty cop shows ushered in by NYPD Blue. The weakest thing about Bloods is that it can't resist adding a conspiracy story line to its cases-of-the-week structure.

A solid cast with tangible family chemistry make Blue Blood a contender.

If not for the narrative clunkiness, Blue Bloods has the potential to be a juicy multigenerational family drama set in a moodily evoked New York, with Selleck's furrier-than-ever mustache as a bonus.

The weekly cops-and-lawyers procedural aspect of the show was never going to hook me, but I found the pilot's core case, featuring an abducted girl, to be particularly manipulative and uninvolving. I was also irked by the contrivances that would allow Moynahan's character to be handling a case in which her brother was accused of malfeasance. I was much more interested in the multigenerational family stuff that played out.

There's perhaps the coppiest cop show of the century so far, the soppy and self-satirizing CBS melodrama Blue Bloods, about an entire family--"the Reagans" yet!--involved in the crime biz.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Started off great the first few seasons but it quickly became boring and political. Yawn!