The Blacklist

Raymond Reddington (James Spader) walks into FBI headquarters in Washington, kneels and waits to be arrested. He has spent two decades on the most-wanted list, and he has come in with an offer: a list of criminals the Bureau has never heard of, and help catching them, on condition that he speaks only to Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone), a profiler on her first day. Jon Bokenkamp’s series ran for ten seasons and 218 episodes between 2013 and 2023 on that arrangement. It is one remarkable performance and a good, ordinary network crime show built round it, with a question at the centre that the writers spend a decade declining to answer.

The performance first, because it is the reason to watch. Spader plays Red as a man who has never been in a hurry in his life. He tells long, fond stories about strangers in distant cities while a man bleeds out beside him. He calls Keen “Lizzie” and means it as affection and as a leash. He is fastidious about hats, wine and threats, and he delivers the threats in a voice so low and pleased with itself that you lean in. We laughed a great deal, and almost always where the writers meant us to. Most critics have made the same point, and on this one they are right.

The engine under him is a case a week. Each episode takes a name from the list, a chemist who dissolves bodies in a bath, a broker who sells other people’s identities, and the task force chases it down while Red stands to one side knowing more than he says. Diego Klattenhoff’s Donald Ressler, who has hunted Red for years and now has to work beside him, is the show’s decent, angry conscience. Harry Lennix gives Harold Cooper, who runs the unit, the stillness of a man who has read every memo. Amir Arison’s Aram Mojtabai, the analyst, is the warmest thing in the building, and Susan Blommaert’s Mr. Kaplan, who tidies up after Red, is the driest. Hisham Tawfiq’s Dembe Zuma, at Red’s shoulder, says little and is missed whenever he is not there.

Production designers Andrew Jackness and Nicholas Lundy put the task force in a disused post office turned black site, all raw concrete and glass boxes, so the FBI looks as unofficial as the man it is working with. Nine cinematographers are credited across the run, Frank Prinzi and Peter Reniers among them, and the look holds: Washington in flat grey daylight, the Post Office in cold blue, and Red’s hotel suites and restaurants lit warm. James S. Levine and Dave Porter score it with brass stabs and a low pulse that tells you, at every act break, that a clock is running. Costume designers Amy Westcott and Christine Bean give Red a fedora and a three-piece suit and Keen a wardrobe of dark FBI practicality.

Megan Boone has the harder job, and the writing does not help her. For several seasons Keen is required to be baffled, to ask the same question, and to be told she is not ready for the answer. Boone is better when Keen is angry, and the series improves whenever it lets her be. Ryan Eggold’s Tom Keen, the schoolteacher husband with the adoption paperwork on the table, is the pilot’s best idea, and Red plants a doubt about him in the first hour that we will not describe.

Then there is the question itself: who Red is to Elizabeth. The series answers it, takes the answer back, answers it differently, and takes that back too. Somewhere in the fifth season we realised we were bored, and then we were annoyed at being bored by a show that had been such good company. Ten seasons is a long time to be asked to care about a secret the people keeping it plainly do not want to give up. The last season brings in Anya Banerjee as Siya Malik and is, in effect, Spader and a new room.

Joe Carnahan directed the first hour, and it is the tightest of them: a bomb, a kidnapped child, a bridge, and Spader already fully formed. Watch the first two seasons and you will have had the best of it. After that, dip in for the guest villains and the monologues, and do not expect the question answered before you tire of asking it. It is a 15 certificate; the violence is frequent and tidy.