The Fall Of The House Of Usher & Blue Bloods Have One Weird Thing In Common
One wouldn't think that the Usher family — renown more for selfishness and avarice than warm feelings of bonhomie — wouldn't have a lot in common with those New York-based straight arrows, the Reagan clan, late of CBS' "Blue Bloods." Yet one specific and important ritual ties both clans together: the family dinner scene.
During "The Fall of the House of Usher," we quickly learn that such meetings are a rare thing in the Usher family. Since most members of the clan can't stand each other, this isn't a big surprise. To wit, the reason why Roderick Usher (Bruce Greenwood) has called the family together isn't to praise their hard work or express his appreciation and love; it's to ferret out the mole leaking information on all of the dirty dealings connected to their work at Fortunato Pharmaceuticals out to governmental sources. Since he and the company have just been indicted on dozens of charges, the matter is more important than the kids' petty squabbling. The dinner concludes with Roderick offering his children, his granddaughter, and his in-laws a bounty of $50 million to find him his rat.
The Reagan family, in a phrase, would never. Family dinners for the closely-knit clan usually involve less scheming and plotting and more togetherness, joking around, and advice-giving. They're also a regular weekly highlight for every single Reagan in the family, taking place every Sunday night. But that isn't the only secret hiding deep in those famous Reagan dinners.
Those family dinners are always a little complicated
While this is the only time we see the Ushers eat together in the entire series — the family having long replaced happy meals around a small kitchen table with gourmet food eaten alone — it's possible that the show's writers were thinking of The Last Supper and perhaps Leonardo's painting of it, which features Jesus Christ addressing his disciples regarding the oncoming ending of his life. It's an image eerily echoed by Roderick's final trip to the Fortunato boardroom, where he's confronted by the silent, mutilated ghosts of his children before confessing the truth about his crimes and accepting his death.
It turns out the reason for the Reagan family's weekly dinners stems from a different sort of inspiration. Late "Blue Bloods" series creator Leonard Goldberg explained to TV Guide in 2019 that he took inspiration from "Freedom from Want," Norman Rockwell's famous painting that depicts a family happily eating a festive dinner together, for the Reagan family's dinner scenes. "That painting was our family," Goldberg explained. "There would be a police story — to keep CBS viewers happy — but it really would be a character piece." It was Goldberg's goal to combine the mom, pop, and apple pie feeling of Rockwell with the grit of the procedural, a mental image that definitely fits the Regan clan to a tee.
Whether it's a last supper or one of many, those collective dinners still provide quite the unusual connection that ties together two very different families.