Blue Bloods season 11: The case for fewer storylines per episode

We’re still doing our best to hope that Blue Bloods season 11 will be bringing new episodes your way a little later this year. There is some encouraging news from New York City, but we’re still not hearing anything specific insofar as a filming start date goes.

With that in mind, we’re ultimately left here to ponder over a number of different things — including what the show will look like whenever production comes back. Take, for example, the number of storylines. One of the criticisms that we had for season 10 is that often, there were so many storylines going on that it was difficult to give any of them a proper due. Some cases were clipped far too soon just because there wasn’t a lot of time to focus on them.

Could that change moving forward? Could we see more individual spotlight episodes, or at least storylines that share multiple characters at the same time? There are a couple of reasons why this could be considered.

1. A smaller number of guest stars – We think that, in general, Blue Bloods is probably going to rely on a smaller group of core people for the sake of making the set safer. Because of that, we imagine that we’ll be seeing a small handful of performances per episode, and allowing more overlap means, in general, less reliance on guest stars.

2. Exploring new territory – We know that Blue Bloods is a show that relies on a very specific formula — you have three or four individual storylines per episode and then also a family dinner. If you did reduce this two two storylines an episode, it could fundamentally allow everyone a chance to divert expectations for what this show is and deliver some new, exciting material. You are a good decade-plus into the show’s run at this point; why not take a few more chances?

Do you think that Blue Bloods season 11 should shake up its structure somewhat?

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(Photo: CBS.)