• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 21, 2026

The differences between “Blue Bloods” and the new “Line of Fire” on NBC lie in the details, but the two shows invite comparison because they are both built around crime-fighting clans.

On “Blue Bloods,” it was the Reagan family, all of whom were involved in the police and prosecutor apparatus in New York City, led by a patriarch played by Tom Selleck.

In “Line of Fire,” premiering Monday night, it’s the Washington-based Hollingsworth family, led by Secret Service agent Mike Hollingsworth (Peter Krause); his estranged wife, U.S. Marshal Jane Hollingsworth (Hope Davis); son Mike Hollingsworth Jr. (Tommy O’Brien), also a Secret Service agent; daughter Clare Hollingsworth (Kat Cunning), an FBI agent; and Russ Hollingsworth (Taylor Bloom), a newly hired analyst at the Department of Justice.

The premises of “Line of Fire” and “Blue Bloods” are similar. As the family members go about their business and practice their professions in their various arms of the criminal justice system, they continuously intersect with each other.

But the big difference between the two shows lies in the nature of the families’ relationships. In “Blue Bloods,” the family remained loyal and loving, represented by the Reagan family dinners that were a staple of the series.

On “Line of Fire,” family dinners range from rare to nonexistent, due mainly to the pressures of their jobs. 

To represent this, the cellphones in Episode One (previewed by the TV Blog) are always abuzz. 

So, you get scene after scene in which various family members are having a conversation with each other, only to be interrupted by emergency phone calls, sometimes simultaneously.

In Episode One, we learn that these job-related pressures have these family members on edge every time they are together. 

In the premiere episode of “Line of Fire,” it just so happens that the Hollingsworths have one of their rare family dinners, and it predictably falls to pieces. 

Unlike the Reagans of “Blue Bloods,” when these Hollingsworths sit down at the dinner table, they are as jumpy as cats on a hot tin roof

“Line of Fire” is a complicated show -- so much so that much of the first episode is taken up with exposition awkwardly forced into the dialogue. 

Such exposition is necessary because keeping track of who’s who, and what agency each of them works for, was so challenging when I watched Episode One that I still wasn’t sure who was who when the episode ended.

To make matters even more confusing, an estranged family member shows up near the end of the episode and sows even more confusion.

To write this TV Blog, I actually had to ask Google Gemini a few questions so I could nail down where at least two of the family members worked. The Wikipedia page on the show didn’t even know it.

When the first episode ended, the entire, five-member Hollingsworth family was seen standing in the doorway of their family home staring outside with worried expressions on their faces.

I realized when I saw them all together in that doorway that for the entire episode I did not even know who all the family members were until that moment.

My own belief about network TV shows is “the simpler, the better.” “Line of Fire” is the complete opposite.

“Line of Fire” premieres Monday night (September 21) at 10 Eastern on NBC.