Kicking off its second season Friday at 10 p.m. on CBS, “Boston Blue,” a spinoff of the network’s police drama “Blue Bloods,” presents an irony that is lost on nobody involved with the series. Wahlberg, a committed New Kid on the Block and about as Boston as they come, is playing a fish out of water … in Boston. As anyone who watched “Blue Bloods” can tell you, Wahlberg’s Danny Regan is a Brooklyn native and veteran NYPD detective. He came to Boston at the start of the first season of “Boston Blue” when his son, Sean (also a cop, played by Mika Amonsen) was injured in the line of duty. Danny stuck around and now works alongside fellow detective Lena Silver (Sonequa Martin-Green), whose family is as entrenched in Boston law enforcement as Danny’s is in New Yawk.
“Dawnnie from Dorchester,” jokes Martin-Green, an Alabama native who learned to speak like a Bostonian for the show. “He always stops and engages. He always has these lovely encounters with people; it’s like everybody is an extended family member or a cousin. Everybody is like, ‘Hey, hey, hey. I know you, I know you, I know you.’”
“Boston Blue” doesn’t bring Wahlberg home as often as you might think. Though laden with local exteriors, including copious drone shots of the Common/Commons, the State House, and other famous locales, most of the show is, like so much television and film, shot on a soundstage in Toronto, where production costs are much lower.
“We would love to shoot in Boston as often as possible,” says showrunner Brandon Sonnier. “The city has embraced us. Boston is a huge part of the fabric of the show. It’s another character in itself and we try as often as we can to get here.” He says they shot two weeks in Boston for the first season, and they frequently send secondary units to shoot exteriors and “our cop cars and things in the environments that we’re representing on the show.”
Later in the day, the shoot moves up the street to the State House, where the scene calls for Wahlberg to walk down an outdoor flight of stairs on Bowdoin Street as he converses with his scene partner, Maggie Lawson. One thing you might not know about film and TV sets unless you’ve visited one: there’s a whole lot of waiting and repetition required to capture what you end up seeing onscreen. Wahlberg, still in his blue suit, and Lawson, in her police uniform, run through a few takes; after one he dances over to the camera crew and explains, a big smile on his face: “I forgot all my lines!”
He’s a loose presence on the set, singing a little bit of “Happy Birthday to You” into a camera (the cameraman explains that his wife’s cousin is a big fan) and generally bouncing around like he’s happy to be home. Earlier in the day, he talked about how he took two of his young costars, Amonsen and Marcus Scribner, to some of his favorite Dorchester haunts, including The Ice Creamsmith and Antonio’s Hi-Fi Pizzeria.
“It was awesome, and it was fun to see them so into it,” Wahlberg says. “We have such a good group, and I like to share history and stories and things like that. It would be very easy for a group of actors to tune out and be like, ‘Shut up already.’ But they’re so awesome about it all.”
Wahlberg, 57, grew up in a different Boston than the one he gets to visit now. He’s old enough to remember the bussing battles of the ‘70s, and the days when the city shined less bright. “It’s a city with a long history, with some really tough parts in its history,” he says.
He recalls a poster he used to see as a kid, a cartoon portrait of the city. “There was the Boston Harbor, and there were boats and planes and all this stuff. It looked like the most wonderful place in the world, and at that time it was a very tense place.” On a trip to Australia he was stunned by the beauty and vitality of Sydney Harbor. “It looked like that poster,” he says. “I was like, ’This is what Boston’s supposed to be.’
“And Boston is that now.”
Common and all.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.
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