Whether it’s a TV show, movie, or live-action play, the dinner scene has been a widely used tactic to bring characters together and move the story forward. The late “Blue Bloods” creator Leonard Goldberg told TV Guide in 2010 that he was inspired to shoot those weekly dinner scenes after flipping through a book of Norman Rockwell paintings. He noticed that one of the images showed a family enjoying a Thanksgiving meal. “That painting was our family,” he said. “There would be a detective story…but it would really be a character piece.” Of course, these meals were much easier to write down on paper than to produce week after week.
When it comes to preparing the actual food and how long each scene takes to shoot, it’s not just the crew that has a challenge, but the actors as well. Tom Selleck says that because there are multiple camera angles, each performer has to repeat their lines multiple times. This results in each dinner scene taking five to eight hours to complete filming. With that amount of time, the show’s prop master Jim Lillis has developed a good idea of what to serve, including the various meats and vegetables. However, thanks to Donnie Wahlberg’s admission, fans now know why one of those vegetables will never be broccoli.