Tom Selleck Calls ‘Blue Bloods’ Cancellation “Very Frustrating” After Having Already Taken a Pay Cut

Tom Selleck says he shaved everything but his iconic mustache to keep Blue Bloods going, but after 14 (or 15, depending who you ask) seasons and a 25 percent producer- and cast-wide pay cut, CBS pulled the plug anyway. And that, Selleck says, was “very frustrating.”

“Blue Bloods was a labor of love,” Selleck told Ted Danson on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name SiriusXM podcast. “The real truth to that is in the last year… at our last family dinner, everybody wanted to come back. We’d already taken a 25 percent cut in salary. We’d already done all sorts of things to keep the show going.”

“It was very frustrating because Blue Bloods was — out of the top 100 shows on broadcast television — number six in our fifteenth year,” Selleck continued.

A check of the Nielsen sheets shows Selleck (mostly) knows his numbers. The final season of Blue Bloods was actually seventh in viewers on network television in the 2024-25 season, though that number drops when elongating the measurement window and adding additional platforms. (Old people, which was Blue Bloods‘ audience, don’t do much delayed viewing, let alone streaming.)

“Nobody wanted to leave. Everybody was gonna stay on. That’s hard to get. It may be some kind of record to have the same cast intact for that length of time,” Selleck said. “Usually— if it wasn’t a family, it would be different, but you know, you couldn’t very well replace Jamie (Will Estes) or Danny (Donnie Wahlberg) or anybody with another actor.”

Though Blue Bloods ended in 2024, the franchise continued with Boston Blue on CBS. This time, Det. Danny Reagan (Wahlberg) is the head of the household.

Danson is “sometimes” joined on the podcast by co-host Woody Harrelson — the full, official title is Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson (sometimes) — which makes the titular Cheers reference a bit stronger. Harrelson was not a part of this live episode, which took place at the Granada Theatre in Santa Barbara, California.

Selleck is making the rounds to promote his memoir, You Never Know. He and Selleck also used to time to reminisce on making Three Men and a Baby together, and discuss Selleck’s star-making Magnum, P.I. role — the one he nearly didn’t take.