I know it’s everywhere, but it was fun—the different personas (bateman, haha) made me wonder about how this story, sans the girlfriend experience, could have lended itself to a great procedural. poker face meets quantum leap with a dash of law and order?
Every couple months I come back to this. There's something so appealing about a whodunnit and the stoic dark-suited man in black & white always does it for me.
Ok hear me out. The central conceit of the show is that organized crime is so professionalized that it can sustain a vast underground network of highly specialized contractors who provide services like “dissolve man” (no. 161) or ”destroy economy” (no. 109) or “deceive wife” (no. 7). James Spader is having the time of his life in his role as our central character: Raymond Reddington, an ex-US Naval Intelligence officer turned Concierge of Crime (yes), turned FBI confidential informant. Every week, Reddington turns over a name on his “Blacklist”—invariably someone the apparently feckless FBI has never even heard of—in exchange for some personal strategic advantage that remains mysterious to both the viewer and the Bureau until the end of the episode. Oh, and Reddington will only speak with Elizabeth Keen, a profiler who has only just graduated from Profiler School, and may or may not be Reddington’s daughter.
10 brilliant seasons that culminate in a shocking twist. I highly recommend to everyone with a brain and eyes who doesn’t want to use them.
