Hey CBS: Don't kill 'Blue Bloods,' says our TV critic

We all know about TV shows that are ready for the glue factory. Yet nine episodes into this 14th and final season, “Blue Bloods” sure doesn't look like glue bait.

Maybe it's pride of work, or some of that doughty Reagan spirit that refuses to bow low before the dictates of TV executives 3,000 miles away. Maybe it just doesn't like glue. But there's something about this last season — something that also refuses to bow low (the midseason finale arrives Friday at 10 p.m. on WCBS/2).

There hasn't been a sense of defiance these past nine episodes so much as a sense of resolve, or that specific “Blue Bloods”' mindset that says this is the Job and this is how we've always done it, with dignity intact and heads held high. In an early episode and rare scene actually freighted with an intimation of mortality — “Blue Bloods'” own perhaps — Frank (Tom Selleck) asked daughter Erin (Bridget Moynahan), “Don't we try to remember why we fought every fight that got sent our way?” What will fans remember of this last season, this last fight?

At least through nine, they'll remember a show that doesn't look tired, or out of ideas, stories or real-world tangents. They'll remember the familial on-screen camaraderie (as familial as ever). To an extent, this is the benefit of 14 years together. Cast and crew can complete each other's sentences and thoughts by now. They know the drill yet still seem to relish the drill.

Nevertheless, the end approaches. Shows this far into the endgame typically have begun to lay the groundwork for that last climactic scene. Not “Blue Bloods,” not yet. The second half next fall may get down to business, but the first has resisted closure. This could be on the off-chance a reprieve is coming, or to convince CBS their decision is so clearly wrongheaded. Or, like Francis Reagan himself, “Bloods'' might be too stubborn (or passive-aggressive) to embrace the inevitable.

Still popular, even revered, why has “Blue Bloods” been canceled anyway? A CBS executive recently explained that the network needed to freshen up the prime-time lineup. Fine, except that the words “fresh” and “CBS prime-time lineup” haven't been used in a sentence — a serious one anyway — in decades. As a reminder, this is the network that's about to bring you a reboot of “Matlock,” another spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory” and an “NCIS” origin drama.

After 14 seasons, could the show and New York be too expensive? We've always been told to follow the money except that “NCIS” is 21 seasons old, and “FBI: International” is shot in Budapest — presumably not inexpensive either.

My own theory — unprovable but that's why it's called a “theory” — is that CBS is embarrassed by “Blue Bloods,” repelled even. Too nonsecular. Not enough violence. Too pro-cop. This is the most conspicuously (indeed only) pro-cop Catholic show on network television, and not just the famed Sunday dinner — a barely disguised metaphor for the mass, and rite of Communion — but the core structure itself. The best episode this season (“Past Is Present,” about the cop whose father killed Frank's son) comes straight out of the Catechism: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven … if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

CBS has made a blunder because network TV — approaching mortality itself, and that veritable glue factory — needs shows that are beloved, needs shows about faith, needs shows about New York City, and cops, and the messy political-judicial-socioeconomic ties that bind them. Fourteen years in, “Blue Bloods”' is still that show. This mistake should be reversed, but don't bet on that happening. Networks, like people, don't like to admit their mistakes, however foolish.