THE BLACKLIST

**1/2 (out of ****)

I made it clear at a pretty young age that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. This excited older people to no end. It wasn’t because they thought I was going to be an especially good writer, or because I would one day be rich and famous. It was because they would be great writers, if they just found the time, but since I did have the time, they would pitch me their story ideas. This is a problem for two different reasons. One, coming up with a premise is the single easiest part about writing. Two, the premises sucked. Premises are like dream stories: everything thinks that their own are very interesting, yet also think that everyone else’s are boring. If these premises were even taken to just some sort of pre-writing phase, they would completely fall apart. But hey, that’s not my job. I’m just the idea man. You fill in all of the commas and characters. And I’ll go think of a sequel to my “When Harry Met Sally meets Die Hard meets Medieval Times: Dinner and Tournament” idea I just pitched to you.

This is what The Blacklist feels like the entire time. Some writer’s uncle, at some family member’s wedding, said “You’re a writer? I got an idea for you. The Blacklist!” He probably already had the title and everything. See, this uncle had just seen Silence of the Lambs. And maybe he had just seen 24 or The Usual Suspects. It doesn’t matter. Some amalgam of TV and film lead to this amalgam of other, less-hacky ideas. Considering all of this, The Blacklist manages to rise above its destiny for as long as it possibly can.

James Spader plays Red Reddington, a very powerful criminal with a lot of connections. Reddington has decided to turn himself in and, as long as he gets to work with one particular FBI agent, he will slowly give the FBI his all of his contacts (The Blacklist!), one criminal at a time. This came straight out of your uncle’s mouth the last time he cornered you at the wedding.

For a solid 30 minutes or so, though, this show races along at a pretty sleek clip. It has a high concept, and it’s trying to plant seeds for future mysteries, and all of this tricks you into thinking it is much better than your average procedural. But once it’s time to figure out the mystery, we’ve fallen all the way to CSI: Spader. The young agent requested by Spader is a master profiler, which is just another way of saying that she’s so good, she spots all the Deus Ex Machinas. No. Bad. Hack isn’t less hack because you’ve figured out a reason why it can exist in your script.

By the time all of this happens, you’re a little bummed, because your terribly low expectations had risen a little bit, and now have been officially dashed. It stays a little interesting throughout the CSI part though, and leaves us with a cliffhanger. All CSIing aside, the biggest wasted asset here is Spader, who is all over the commercials, yet doesn’t have a ton to do here. The success of The Blacklist won’t rely on getting out of their hacky procedural ruts (apparently people either don’t mind those, or love those), but instead letting Spader loose to be as crazy and original as he can be. Spader, cold off of his stint on The Office, is the part of the premise that didn’t come from your uncle, which is why it actually feels like it could work.

-Ryan Haley