Series two saw the introductions of Oliver Milburn as DCI Scott Vaughan and James Thornton as Constable Jake Loughton.

The series was announced on 27 April 2006, and was created by Tony Jordan as a spin-off from the established medical drama Holby City.

Jordan spent time with first serving officers and believed that the key to a successful police drama was its ability to reflect a society "in which it existed".

Jordan questioned whether the series would be "held in disdain" by "soap snobs", but made the ultimate decision to name the drama HolbyBlue after remembering the "joy" he took from "surprising the audience by subverting expectation".

Jod Mitchell of The Daily Telegraph expressed that the series injected "pace and verve" into the BBC One schedule.

Her former partner, PC Robert Clifton, learns of Lucy's boyfriend's criminal reputation and forces the pair to separate.

Luke agrees to put his terminally ill mother in a care home,[7] but is later heartbroken when she dies following a fall.

[7] In series two, well-established Holby City character Jac Naylor is arrested on suspicion of the murder of Alan Clooney, a well-known sex offender who tried to rape her.

It was also confirmed that Tony Jordan had been recruited to work on the scripts and consider "how storylines between the police station and the hospital could be intertwined for the programme.

Jordan went on to research his new project by spending time with first serving officers, who "portrayed a world of endless, statistic-led red tape".

After spending time with first serving officers, Jordan concluded that he was left with an image "not of a modern-day police force, fighting crime on the streets and keeping us all safe, but some kind of unwieldy, top-heavy administrative process, more concerned with public opinion than dispensing justice.

[17] As a result of a conversation with Featherstone, Jordan created a drama in which his characters would be forced to deal with limited resources and bureaucracy stemming from the war on terror, whilst trying to combat domestic crime.

However, it was also noted that if HolbyBlue aired on a Wednesday night, it would clash with ITV's long-running police drama, The Bill.

Phillips added that the company was "extremely proud" of the 20 hours of drama that were created, and concluded with Red Planet Pictures' focus turning to "developing shows which will live up to those high standards set out on HolbyBlue.

Cooke predicted that HolbyBlue would be a ratings success, but found the series' lack of originality inexcusable given that the BBC is funded by the television licence fee.

[28] Andre Pettie of The Daily Telegraph disliked the pacing, observing that the script moved so fast it was hard to judge the quality of the series, concluding that it was overall unsatisfactory.

[29] In contrast, The Guardian's Nancy Banks-Smith reviewed the episode positively, calling it "fast and funny and punctuated with poignancy",[30] and Jod Mitchell of The Daily Telegraph praised the intelligent writing and fast direction, writing that despite its familiarity, the series injected "pace and verve" into the BBC One schedule.

[32] McLean later deemed Keenan "two-dimensional", but still found him to be an improvement on the series' female characters, who he felt were extremely under-written.

McLean felt that the episode tackled the issue of domestic violence intelligently, and praised "sterling performances" by Macaninch, Lucker, Colley and Drew.

[35] The crossover episode in which Holby City's Jac Naylor is interrogated by the HolbyBlue police officers attracted mixed reviews.

[37] McLean was also unimpressed, writing, Should the appearance of Holby City's spiky Jac in HolbyBlue, on suspicion of attempted murder, be greeted with interest or indifference?

And Jac's plot is so well signposted that you're left not anticipating its resolution but frustrated that it took so long.Mark Wright of The Stage was a frequent reviewer of HolbyBlue.

He found the opening episode "boring",[39] deeming it "a cliché-ridden disaster with some duff casting decisions and bizarrely clunky dialogue".

[19] Despite his criticism, Wright was pleased when the programme was recommissioned for a second series, hoping that an increased number of episodes would allow the production team to fix issues with HolbyBlue and further develop its format.

[40] The first episode of HolbyBlue was watched by an audience of 5.46 million viewers on BBC One, making it the fifteenth most-watched programme on the channel for the week of its broadcast.

[48] The final two episodes of series one experienced an increase in viewership, to 4.13 and 4.36 million respectively, ranking HolbyBlue twenty-sixth then twenty-fourth in the channel ratings for the weeks of broadcast.