The Blacklist has a premise that could have carried a perfectly decent crime procedural on its own. One of the FBI’s most wanted men walks into headquarters, gives himself up and announces that he has a list of criminals, terrorists and professional wrong’uns that the authorities barely know exist. There is one condition: Raymond Reddington will only work with rookie profiler Elizabeth Keen.

Then James Spader walks into the room and makes the entire thing his.

Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington is the reason The Blacklist works as well as it does. Spader gives him a peculiar mixture of confidence, amusement and menace, often without appearing to change gear. Red can be discussing murder, an obscure restaurant, somebody he once met in Marrakesh or the best way to remove a dangerous criminal from circulation, and somehow it all sounds equally important to him.

He is funny too, which matters. Plenty of television criminals can glower across a table. Red will instead wander into the conversation with a story, take an unnecessarily scenic route to the point and leave everyone else wondering whether they have just been threatened, entertained or invited to dinner. Sometimes it is all three.

The mystery surrounding his interest in Elizabeth Keen gives the early seasons their larger hook. Megan Boone has the difficult job of playing opposite a character specifically designed to dominate every room, but Elizabeth’s gradual realisation that almost nothing around her is as straightforward as it first appears gives the series somewhere to go beyond the weekly arrests.

The blacklist itself is a cracking idea

The case-of-the-week structure suits the show. Each new name on Red’s list gives the writers an excuse to produce another unusually specialised criminal organisation, assassin, fixer, smuggler or outright lunatic. Some are grounded enough to feel plausible. Others feel as though Red has been collecting Bond villains in a notebook for twenty years.

That unpredictability is part of the fun. You can sit down for an episode knowing roughly how the machinery works without necessarily knowing what sort of criminal is about to fall out of it. Red supplies information, the FBI task force chases it, somebody discovers that Red neglected to mention a fairly important detail, and everyone remembers once again that trusting Raymond Reddington is generally a terrible idea.

Harold Cooper, Donald Ressler and the rest of the task force give that format some stability, while Dembe becomes increasingly important as the man who knows Red better than almost anybody and still occasionally looks as though he is reconsidering his career choices. For a long-running network drama, that balance between familiar procedure and continuing story is one of The Blacklist’s biggest strengths. You can enjoy an individual criminal without needing a flowchart beside the sofa.

The longer The Blacklist runs, the more interested it becomes in Red’s past, Elizabeth’s history and exactly who is related to whom, lying about whom, secretly working for whom or possibly not dead after all. At its best, this gives the show a reason to keep moving. At its worst, the mythology can become a cupboard you open very carefully because seventeen unanswered questions are leaning against the door.

That is where Spader earns his keep again. Even when the larger mystery becomes tangled, Red remains enormously watchable. His relationships change, loyalties shift and the body count rises, but the character still feels recognisably himself. He can be generous one minute and frighteningly practical the next. The show rarely asks us to forget what he is simply because we enjoy spending time with him.

There is also something pleasingly old-fashioned about The Blacklist. It belongs to that era of American television where a series could comfortably run twenty-plus episodes a season, give supporting characters room to breathe and still find time for a criminal who has developed an implausibly elaborate method of ruining somebody’s Tuesday.

One man, one list, a remarkable number of bodies

The Blacklist is not flawless. The mythology eventually ties itself into knots, some revelations work considerably better than others and there are points where the hunt for the next enormous secret starts getting in the way of the simpler pleasure of Red handing the FBI another impossible target.

But when the formula is firing, it is extremely easy television to keep watching. The weekly criminals give it momentum, the continuing story supplies the bait for the next episode, and James Spader sits comfortably in the middle of both with that familiar half-smile suggesting he knows something nobody else does.

There are bigger crime dramas, darker ones and certainly tidier ones. Few, however, have Raymond Reddington walking through the door. That makes quite a difference. – Phil