What should I watch next? It’s a question that just keeps getting asked, despite — or maybe because of — how many new television shows are constantly being released. With so many options, shouldn’t it be easy to find something to watch? Sure, you can scroll through Netflix’s home page for hours, but what should
The Blacklist
What should I watch next? It’s a question that gets asked over and over again despite all the new television shows coming out, a phenomenon that seems counter intuitive. With so many options, shouldn’t it be easy to find something to watch? Sure, you can scroll through the home page of Netflix for hours, but
The Blacklist, NBC’s endlessly twisty procedural about criminal mastermind Raymond “Red” Reddington (James Spader) and his elaborate plot to help the FBI catch most-wanted criminals in service of his own mysterious personal agenda, is one of the most consistently entertaining dramas left on broadcast TV. And now that Season 8 is nearly here (Friday, Nov.
NBC is ready for you to enjoy some fall TV — though your favorites will be returning a bit later than usual. The network will be kicking things off in September with Transplant, a syndicated Canadian medical drama, to fill your hospital drama needs until Chicago Med returns in November and New Amsterdam rejoins the schedule in
The Blacklist Season 7 is out on Blu-Ray and DVD on Tuesday, Aug. 11, and the home edition is packed with great bonus features, like this funny blooper reel that shows the lighter side of making the show. If you ever find yourself on set with James Spader, don’t say “driving driving driving” to him!
The Blacklist rarely gets credit for its weirdness, but maybe this episode, the Season 7 finale, will be the one to turn the tide. Much has been made (rightfully) about the quarantine-induced decision to complete the half-finished episode with “graphic novel”-style animation and accelerate some of the plot lines to function as a thrilling season
In the post-Tom Keen (Ryan Eggold) era of The Blacklist, the show has occasionally hinted at a will they/won’t they between FBI colleagues Liz Keen (Megan Boone) and Donald Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff), and Friday’s 17th episode of Season 7, “Brothers,” teased that tantalizing possibility again. In the episode, Ressler went to his hometown of Detroit
When a show regularly operates from within a moral morass, it’s hard to take more overtly moralizing episodes or plotlines seriously. That is especially true when real-life controversies are ultimately used as a cudgel to make a familiar point about that existing morass. This is all to say that it’s pretty unusual to watch an
Despite its intense focus on the “family” drama between Reddington (James Spader) and Liz (Megan Boone), The Blacklist has more successfully fleshed out supporting characters than in the early years. This is a function of being a long-running series with 22 hours to fill, but that reality doesn’t always dictate that detours from the main
James Spader, The Blacklist In the midst of a global pandemic, some of us seek out comfort and predictability. And few things are more predictable right now than The Blacklist getting fully nutty with it on NBC Fridays. Following an uneven Purdue Pharma “ripped from the headlines” hour and a satisfying Agatha Christie riff that
If last week’s midseason premiere of The Blacklist demonstrated how the show, like its main characters, can frustratingly avoid previous seismic events, this week’s suggested a way to alleviate that frustration: remove most of the cast altogether. Outside of a brief kicker at Agnes’ ballet performance, “Cornelius Ruck” jettisoned everyone in the main cast except
After a long hiatus, The Blacklist appears willing to ease back into its main conflicts and storylines. The fall finale upended the status quo once more, with Liz (Megan Boone) and Katarina (Laila Robins) teaming up to outsmart Reddington (James Spader), but the first episode in three months kept the familial turmoil on the back
For TV shows, there’s no perfect way to tease out a major plot development. If you rush the information out quickly, it feels unearned. But wait too long and viewers can lose interest in the journey it takes to get to the reveal. The Blacklist currently has two major storylines hampered by the latter issue,
OK, The Blacklist is at the peak of its topical episode powers right now. After last week’s magnificent riff on the horrors (/evil benefits) of deep fake technology, this episode went to a much darker place, one where the 1994 comedic film Junior and modern politics intertwine. That’s right, folks. This hour was all about
Few things about The Blacklist are more enjoyable than when the show decides to take on the evils of contemporary technology. Rarely is there any kind of Black Mirror-esque “commentary” on society. Instead, the tech is typically incorporated to Red’s (James Spader) criminal enterprise — which is particularly funny given his full philistine (or boomer?)
Three’s a trend — that’s the saying, right? Following Aram- and Harold-heavy episodes the last two weeks, The Blacklist gave Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff) a turn at the center of the action, sort of. “Norman Devane” had more business to handle than the previous two efforts, but it still provided a solid exploration of Ressler’s shifting
The supporting character spotlight continues on The Blacklist. After Aram’s odyssey into the dark heart of one-percenter death parties in last week’s episode, “Kuwait” pushed Harold (Harry Lennix) to center stage with a quintessential story, told in a quintessential way. A colleague thought to be dead suddenly surfaced very much alive, and very much holding
One of the purest pleasures of watching a long-running procedural is the episode that gives the spotlight to a supporting character. In the crime and espionage genres, this maneuver typically throws the tech experts — the nerds — into the field, where they’re fundamentally out of their element. Until they’re not, of course. Now seven
At the Tribeca TV Festival on Thursday, film and TV great James Spader sat down with moderator Whoopi Goldberg for a conversation about his always-unpredictable, 40-plus-year career, from Sex, Lies, and Videotape to Boston Legal to his current role as cosmopolitan criminal mastermind Raymond “Red” Reddington on NBC’sThe Blacklist, which returns for its seventh season