Watched: The Blacklist, Season 1
I started watching this NBC drama before I arrived in the USA, and it just concluded its first season. With the exception of Heroes, that probably makes The Blacklist hard to beat in terms of investment over a period of time; I’ve watched full seasons of plenty of shows before, but rarely drawn out over such a long period.
As for the show itself, it’s overhwhelmingly fine - not great, not terrible, but just very okay. The central gimmick that distances it from other criminal-of-the-week shows (and there are so many in this country! Just the countless Law and Order spinoffs amount to hundreds of hours of TV alone, and that doesn’t even begin to cover it) is that James Spader plays a criminal mastermind called Raymond Reddington (no, seriously), a man who gives himself up to the FBI and negotiates a deal where he’ll help them with cases on his (and here’s the title) blacklist in return for immunity.
Spader ends up being the show’s biggest achievement and biggest failure, in a way. He’s gleefully bonkers, often spinning off into bizarre side stories that are sometimes thinly-veiled parables and sometimes just weird, and his acting style suits TV well - at his best, he elevates the show above and beyond other crime dramas.
Unfortunately, like a lot of other network television, this show often suffers from really bad writing. While that tends to go unnoticed in the otherwise-unremarkable cast (Megan Boone as the series protagonist tries, bless her, but she just isn’t a very good actor), with Spader it always feels like a missed opportunity, like the writers are squandering the opportunities available to them.
Usually, this comes down to the restrictions of the format - like most TV of this nature, there’s a grand overarching plot to keep you coming back, but at its heart it’s a monster-of-the-week show, dealing with a cast of guest stars whose sole job is to do something terrible, then get arrested. While this format allows for some one-off performances that stand out - Robert Sean Leonard has a great performance early on, and Tom Noonan (previously seen as Philip Seymour Hoffman’s double in Synecdoche, New York) has an incredibly creepy turn too - but often even those performances are rote and by-the-numbers.
It’s just not sure what it wants to be. There’s humor, here, and when it takes a demented tone it’s at its best - there’s a devilishly dark show clawing to get out. Laid on top of it all, though, is an attempt to create some element of human drama, particularly between Boone’s character and Reddington (who might be/definitely is her dad), and it’s here that the bottom just falls out of the whole thing. By the end, I was still enjoying it, albeit with caveats, but I didn’t care about the protagonist in the slightest. It’s coming back for a second season; I’ll probably skip it.