Even as it enters its 11th season on CBS, Blue Bloods remains a primetime staple and a ratings powerhouse for the network. So much so that it appears the beloved series will continue to air on CBS for many years to come. While Blue Bloods’ continued success is great news for CBS, it’s not entirely true for the duo who brought it to television – because they’re no longer on the series’ creative team. In fact, Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green haven’t worked on Blue Bloods in over a decade because their CBS bosses fired them at the end of the first season.
That news is likely to surprise longtime Blue Bloods fans, if only because season 1 of the show — about New York’s Reagan family, all of whom have ties to law enforcement, led by Tom Selleck’s NYPD Commissioner patriarch — proved it was a legitimate breakout with serious potential for a multi-season run. It was the kind of breakout that should have kept Blue Bloods’ senior creative team on the small screen for at least another season. Instead, it was one and done for Burgess and Green, who were relegated to the sidelines while the show they created became one of CBS’s longest-running.
According to a 2011 Deadline report, even though the series was raking in the ratings, all was not well behind the scenes, with season 1 showrunner Ken Sanzel resigning after ongoing feuds with Blue Bloods star Tom Selleck over the show’s narrative direction. A few months later, Burgess and Green were reportedly fired for arguing with network executives about a similar issue.
Blue Bloods was not the first hit series from which Burgess and Green were fired.
According to Deadline, the feud began with Mitchell and Burgess attempting to make Blue Bloods as much about the Reagan family dynamics as the cr1mes and misdemeanors they’re investigating (an approach favored by ’80s icon Tom Selleck himself). CBS executives reportedly wanted to make the show more of a tried-and-true police procedural.
As is often the case in such creative clashes, network executives won by unceremoniously removing the opposing party, removing Emmy-winning Burgess and Green from their own hit series.
It’s worth noting that Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green’s Emmy wins did not come from their single season reign on Blue Bloods. Rather, the pair won an Emmy for a far more prominent cr1me drama, The Sopranos, an operatic gangland saga that the world continues to study, dissect, and revere. And, as it turns out, the dynamic duo (who wrote 22 episodes of the iconic series) were also fired there.
While the specifics of Burgess and Green’s departure from The Sopranos remain unknown, it appears that after a few seasons in the HBO drama’s writer’s room, the pair simply fell out of favor with Chase, according to Vulture. Chase did, however, show them the door sometime during the show’s final season.
Burgess and Green clearly recovered well from their Sopranos exit, landing a series order for Blue Bloods a few years later. Blue Bloods was even billed as “from the Executive Producers of The Sopranos” by CBS when it first aired in 2010. Even though their time on the show was brief, Burgess and Green can still count Blue Bloods as one of their biggest successes.
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