Where is Boston Blue filmed? The show flies into Boston every couple of weeks and builds the rest somewhere cheaper
Boston Blue sends Danny Reagan to Boston. The show itself mostly stays in Toronto, and its star once offered half his paycheck to change that.
CBS's Boston Blue, the Blue Bloods spinoff that moves Donnie Wahlberg's Danny Reagan from New York to Boston, is filmed mostly in Toronto. Interiors, including the police station and the characters' homes, are shot on Toronto stages, and the city's downtown gets dressed as Boston for street scenes, per Primetimer. The crew travels to Boston for the exteriors Toronto can't fake.
Season 2 premiered on October 9, 2026, and airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on CBS, with all 20 season 1 episodes on Paramount+.
Why not Boston
Wahlberg says he asked, and lost. On the Billy & Lisa in the Morning podcast in August 2025, he explained the math, per Country Living.
"I said, 'We got to go to Boston.' They said, 'We can't afford it.'"
— Donnie Wahlberg, on the Billy & Lisa in the Morning podcast
His numbers: filming in Canada costs "basically thirty cents on the dollar," against eighty or ninety cents in the U.S., "even with tax breaks." In April 2026, he told Andy Cohen he'd offered to give back 50% of his paycheck to move the show, per Cheat Sheet. The studio's answer, as he relayed it: they couldn't film the show in Boston, "but we'll do a couple."
On paper, the two places offer similar incentives. Ontario offers a 21.5% tax credit for service productions, and the federal government adds 16% on top, per Pinewood Toronto Studios. Massachusetts offers a 25% production credit, a 25% payroll credit and a sales tax exemption. Wahlberg's gap between thirty cents and ninety cents is about everything that happens after the credits are counted.
What's actually Boston
The Boston trips are short and very visible. Here's what has been confirmed as shot in the city:
- Boston Common: Wahlberg filmed a chase through the park on August 4, 2025, per Boston.com, after weeks in Toronto.
- Fenway Park: He shot a sequence under the Green Monster.
- Park Street station and the Granary Burying Ground: Both appear in the downtown footage, per Primetimer.
The Common shoot started with a fan. Someone posted that the show should be filmed in Boston, and Wahlberg replied, "Be there in a week with cameras and crew." A week later, he was.
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His stated plan was to "go to Boston every couple of weeks and do what we did." He also admitted the show couldn't shoot there full-time even if the money worked, because the crowds are "nonstop."
"You can't fake what Boston looks like."
— Donnie Wahlberg, on the same podcast
The rest of the time, Toronto fakes it. It's done Boston before: Good Will Hunting, the most Boston movie of the '90s, shot scenes at the University of Toronto's Whitney Hall, per the Museum of Toronto.
The Blue Bloods comparison
The parent show never had this problem on screen. Blue Bloods was filmed on location in New York City for 14 seasons, with interiors on soundstages in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and the Reagan house in Bay Ridge, per Wikipedia. Its cast and producers reportedly took a pay cut to get season 14 renewed, and the show ended in December 2024.
Wahlberg was in that cast. A year later he was offering to give back half his salary again, this time for a city the show is named after and mostly doesn't film in.
Previously we wrote: Where was Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol filmed? You can buy a ticket to Depp's Victorian London