Confession - I’m not much of a prime time TV or current movie viewer. My TV tastes run to the Automotive, History, Science and Discover channels along with whatever movies make it to regular TV or “Movies on Demand”, not to be confused with any kind of pay-per-view. I don’t pay. Despite this I have managed to view a few classics in their entirety. Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and the Fargo series come to mind.
But thanks to hours of watching YouTube I have found numerous shows I should have watched. House, for instance. And Reacher. I watch any scene from them that pops up on YouTube. Also, thanks to not seeing many actors since their early roles I can be quite surprised to see how they look today. I had no idea Brian Cranston played Walter White and Tom Whatley until after Breaking Bad. I had to go back and look at the Seinfeld episode to believe it.
James Spader. The only thing I ever saw him in was Sex, Lies and Videotape and I would much rather I hadn’t seen that slimeball at all. Until a scene from The Blacklist graced my screen. Wow, who is this guy? I sought out as many scenes as I could find and even then it wasn’t until I read about the back story that I realized it was the present day, somewhat rotund, Spader! I love that cocky, eloquent, all-too-self-assured killer role. No one can put a bullet though someone’s forehead with a bemused smile like Raymond Reddington. I think Spader has created a character just as indelible as Tony Soprano or Walter White.
James Spader is definitely the best part of The Blacklist but should you be tempted to watch the series, I’ll warn you that it is ten very long seasons of considerably variable quality. I’ll spoiler code some of the weirdness from later seasons:
There are at least a few people who are killed by CGI but nonetheless gross weaponized beetles and another episode featuring killer sex robots.
The show does have a lot of good music in it though. The final episode has a version of “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” that is better than the original by far.
Alan Shore, who started on the final season of The Practice and then went on to star in several seasons of Boston Legal alongside William Shatner.
Spader as Reddington is very watchable at being quippy and clever in basically exactly the length of time that fits into a YouTube short, which is also how I found it before picking up the full series. I realized I had started hate-watching it and mostly gave up after the sixth or seventh scene that played out, like,
Reddington: <gets shot in the chest; everyone starts freaking out>
Reddington: “Ah, I remember the last time I was shot in the chest. It was outside of a little bistro in Arles. Monsieur Letourneau’s. Dembe insisted he wanted to try bouillabaisse. Have you been to Arles, Liz? It was where van Gogh did some of his finest paintings. Of course, after that, I had my ribcage replaced with titanium… and kevlar.”
Reddington: <removes the bullet, puts it into his own gun, and shoots the bad guy in the head>
Reddington: “It makes getting through airport security hell, but at times like this it does seem like a good investment.”
And then he adjusts his hat and strides off because it turns out he wanted them to shoot him and it was part of some gambit so he could confirm by the sound of the bullet that it was made by the Blue Locust, the most feared assassin of a secretive organization that has elected every politician since 1984 and he’s condescendingly surprised the FBI has never heard of even though they have also never been mentioned by Reddington before and will never be mentioned again.
But from a watching clips point of view, it’s grand Raymond Reddington is written like Hannibal Lecter as seen in a particularly witty teenager’s fanfic, so it’s just all the scenes where Hannibal Lecter is improbably clever and flawless, and Spader apparently was born to play that role. He is delightfully charismatic.
I watched the first episode, liked it well enough. Watched another several and found it sorta entertaining, but my eyebrow started quirking. I began to wonder if this would be one of those superficially interesting shows that would start irritating me (like, say, Burn Notice). Because it was mostly Spader’s charisma + mystery. Spader is written as the sort of mannered, impossibly brilliant character that could quickly devolve into a caricature and many seasons of drawn out mystery can just be annoyingly frustrating and with a usually unsatisfactory conclusion. Read up on the series, including some spoilers and decided yep - not worth any more of my time. Cut my losses and bailed.
It was clips from this show that inspired my “I want to hear James Spader recite ‘The Hunting of the Snark’” thread. But I was never tempted to watch the show.
Raymond Reddington is written like Hannibal Lecter as seen in a particularly witty teenager’s fanfic, so it’s just all the scenes where Hannibal Lecter is improbably clever and flawless, and Spader apparently was born to play that role. He is delightfully charismatic.