Many people will want to stop reading when I say this is a police procedural, but my excuse for liking this type of show is that it explores what it means to be human in the contemporary world. This is a post-Assange production, one which reflects the moral relativism of global politics, where Capital is deeply embedded in the notion of freedom and the borders between criminal and licit activity blur, warp, and shift.
James Spader is wonderful as the mercurial Raymond Reddington, a name that along with other snippets of scripting ties this book back to Norman Mailer’s ‘Harlot’s Ghost’ and hence to Nabokov’s ‘Ada’. ‘The Blacklist’ is sort of a de-facto canonical product a cross between ‘NCIS’ and ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ with as many close-ups as car chases, gun battles, and forced intrusions.
Running to 10 seasons, it’s also a saga in the vein of series of 19th century novels. What it does best is establish rules for understanding that like a good soap opera are tied to tropes of personality that run through popular discourse. Just as in ‘B&B’ Thomas stands for chaos and the lure of the illicit, and Hope stands for constancy and virtue, in ‘The Blacklist’ Aram (Amir Arison) stands for goodness and honesty while Ressler (Diego Klattenhof) stands for apple-pie America. When Hope kisses Thomas in Rome you are sucked into someone else’s reality because of all the episodes of ‘B&B’ where Thomas has been justly spurned by so many people. When Ressler snuggles up in bed in an opioid daze in a cheap motel you are drawn into a global story of self-hatred and exploitation.
‘The Blacklist’ offers a range of different characters, a kaleidoscope of “issues” like any good police procedural, it has “good” characters no less flimsy than in any other cultural product but the longevity of the series and the skill of Spader ensure that you are allowed to explore them in a more complete way than is usual for other OTT dramas, certainly more than in most movies on the big or small screen.
You are the cop.
There are many antidotes to the sophistication of the plots exploited in ‘The Blacklist’ and Netflix offers a range of true-crime dramas, some of which highlight how corrupt the police can be. I urge anyone who reads this to understand that my comprehension of ‘The Blacklist’ is not innocent. The storylines are often complex and exhausting, the reasoning of the criminals bizarre, the flips and switches confusing. It’s really not necessary to make things this bewildering in order to entertain. Or perhaps I’m wrong and it IS necessary in order to explore the nature of civil society. Where to draw the line between legal and illegal, when is violence justified, how to know what to believe in?
In the post-Assange era the lines have shifted so that we cannot know beforehand if something “should” be legal. What words do we use to describe a solution to a problem so difficult to untangle that it calls into question the very system that we subscribe to, and that benefits us? ‘The Blacklist’ has this conundrum at heart, and it is a wild ride.
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