Update: finally finished that 10-season show I kept quitting

I started watching The Blacklist back in January but kept dropping it around season 4. Last weekend I got sick and just pushed through the boring parts. Turns out the middle seasons are rough but season 8 and 9 actually pick up a lot. Has anyone else struggled to get past a certain season of a long show?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_richard2mo agoTop Commenter

Oh man, I gotta push back on that a little. The Blacklist is one of those shows where I actually liked the middle seasons (you know, the ones everyone complains about) because they were doing so much world building. Season 4 is where they really start digging into the whole mythology angle, and yeah it's slow, but I think that payoff later on only works because of all that groundwork. Season 8 and 9 are great, don't get me wrong, but I feel like you kind of need to earn that momentum by sitting through the slower parts. Maybe I'm just weird, but I actually prefer when a long show takes its time instead of rushing to the good stuff every episode.

gavin_mason312mo ago

Read an interview with the creator once where he basically said season 4 was their "emotional core" for the whole Reddington mystery. Ngl, that changed how I watched those slower episodes. It made me pay way more attention to the little details between Red and Liz, like those quiet scenes where they're just talking in the car or at a diner. Tbh, I think the showrunners knew exactly what they were doing, even if it felt weird at the time. Slow burn can be a slog, but it's the only way to make the big twists hit as hard as they do.

patricia_wright20d ago

Actually season 4 is the one where they filmed most of it without knowing if they'd get a season 5, which is funny because that's the emotional core interview Gavin is talking about. I remember reading that same thing and then going back to rewatch the whole season straight through. There's this one scene in episode 4.18 where Red and Liz are sitting in that old diner and he talks about his father for like five minutes straight and I swear on a rewatch you catch stuff in his eye movements that you miss the first time. But here's the thing, that diner scene wasn't even in the original script, they added it last minute after James Spader ad libbed something about pancakes during a take. The showrunners then built the whole emotional anchor around that one random ad lib, which is both brilliant and kind of insane when you think about it. So yeah the slow burn works but it's almost accidental genius, they didn't plan for season 4 to be that way, they just got lucky with Spader's improv and ran with it.