“Boston Blue” co-creators Brandon Sonnier and Brandon Margolis started working together years prior to their follow-up to “Blue Bloods” — and they even tried to sell a zombie series before they conceived of the police procedural spinoff.
In fact, Margolis originally wrote a script for a zombie movie, which shifted into a TV show on Sonnier’s recommendation after he read and enjoyed the project. After collaborating on some finishing touches to Margolis’ original idea, the pair shopped the series around Hollywood with the hopes of selling it to a network.
“We got a ton of meetings around town, and the note was, ‘We love this, but you can’t put zombies on television. What else do you have?'” Margolis told the Television Academy. This was approximately a year before AMC optioned the comic adaptation series “The Walking Dead,” so the message that networks seemingly wanted to send became clear not long after their onslaught of rejections. “Now we know what they were saying was that you two can’t put zombies on television,” Margolis added.
Sonnier and Margolis couldn’t compete with The Walking Dead
“The Walking Dead” went on to be considered one of the best zombie shows of all time and amassed a franchise spanning six spinoff series — but Brandon Margolis and Brandon Sonnier decided to leave the zombie world behind as they continued their work on other projects after their pilot was rejected around Hollywood.
Interestingly enough, Margolis told the Television Academy that the scripts he and Sonnier wrote following the zombie pilot didn’t get nearly as much attention as that initial spec. But despite the puzzling response from networks, eventually the writing partners found their niche in television’s crime dramas.
The creative duo went on to be part of the writing team for the 2013 crime drama series “The Blacklist” and co-created the “Bad Boys” spinoff show “L.A.’s Finest” in 2019 before finding their most recent success with “Boston Blue.” But unfortunately for genre fans, it doesn’t seem like Sonnier and Margolis plan to revisit their zombie idea anytime soon.
