Brief Story Line
The pilot episode started with the scene of a person wearing hat and suit getting ready to go to FBI headquarter in Washington DC. When he came inside the building, he introduced himself as Raymond "Red" Reddington (played by James Spader - Sex, Lies and Videotapes, Stargate, Boston Legal TV series etc) and looking for Assistant Director Harold Cooper (Harry Lennix - Ray, Stomp The Yard, Man of Steel etc). Immediately the lobby was swarmed by so many agents pointing their guns at him as it turned out he was in on the most wanted list of FBI. He was then brought into a special prison to be interrogated.
Special Agent Donald Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff - Pacific Rim, Homeland TV series etc) was the agent who tried to capture Red for sometime confirmed the person really was Reddington. Red revealed his reason to surrender was to help FBI capture a terrorist who was presumed dead. However, he only would like to continue giving the information to Agent Elizabeth Keen whom Harold and Ressler never heard of.
Meanwhile we were introduced to Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone - My Bloody Valentine 3D, Step Up Revolution etc) who was getting ready to have her 1st day at work as FBI profiler. She had a loving husband named Tom Keen (Ryan Eggold - The Single Moms Club, 90210 TV series etc) who was an elementary teacher. Elizabeth was then brought in and met with Red who seemed to know a lot about her personal matters even called by her childhood name Lizzy.
It appeared that the information given by Red were all valid and the threats were real. However, in order to really help capturing the terrorist, Red started to demand he no longer be put in special prison but allowed to roam freely as though he was still the "broker" for all things in criminal world. After successfully capturing the first criminal in the pilot episode, Red offered the FBI to capture many more who he claimed to be in the "blacklist". A list of all criminals who were hidden so well that even FBI were not aware. However, he gave 2 rules to FBI, which were immunity and he only want to speak to Agent Keen.
Apart from Harold and Ressler, the so called task force was also supported with Meera Malik the CIA field agent (Parminder Nagra - Bend it Like Beckham) and Aram the IT expert (Amir Arison). During the first season, the people captured from the blacklist consisted of criminals who could kill people and covering it into accidents, a murderer who would dissolved his victim using chemicals, various terrorists, thief, international hacker and many other types. Some were harder to capture than others and 1 particular enemy was the hardest of them all which would be revealed in the episode 21-22.
End of Brief Story Line
Well I was pretty excited when watching the pilot episode. It had all the ingredients of an interesting crime drama, with various plots that seemed to be promising even from the first episode. However, I have a feeling that the after a while the plot/twists becoming a little bit more predictable. And unfortunately starting from middle episodes I started to feel that Lizzy's character become increasingly too dependent on Red. I was expecting her to be a more solid, smart and strong character but instead she became a little bit slow in deducting and always ask Red on how to solve matters.
However, I got to admit that the "Blacklist" itself was truly interesting. It's intriguing to find out who would be the criminal we would see in every episode. The process of capturing the criminals were also quite good as it involved the information given by Red, some analytical thinking, occasional information gathering using the expertise from Aram and of course lots of kickass action involving Ressler & Meera.
My personal favorite episodes would have to be the pilot episode, episodes 9 & 10 involving Anslo Raddick, episode 15 which gave the totally cool ending & surprise and the 2 last episodes which were totally awesome and provided some twists & shocking events also. The ending of season 1 also raised our curiosity to continue to season 2.
So my view of season 1 is that it certainly has its ups and downs, where some criminals were more interesting than others, some got more actions than others and certain episodes offered new twist and surprise. It is not a very heavy drama where you need to think a lot. It's pretty enjoyable and nice. The odd relationship between Red and Lizzy were also quite intriguing, while we were also kept on guessing what was Red's interest on Lizzy. Also the relationship between Lizzy and her husband Tom who both of them were trying to adopt a child of their own and Lizz's difficulty of having to juggle between her confidential and dangerous work with her personal life with Tom which endangered their marriage life as well.
The star of this series I truly believed was James Spader as Reddington. He was able to portray himself as a charming individual, mysterious, deadly, very very dangerous and could kill people easily. The rest of the cast were quite good as well, but as I said, James Spader really was the main attraction. He was even nominated for Golden Globe award for his performance in the first and second season.
For those who are interested in watching crime drama, with some of those ingredients that I mentioned above, this one certainly is attractive. But be warned that each season is long so if you are preferring to watch TV series with shorter episodes like 12 or 16 per season, then this might not be to your liking. But if you are OK with it, then you can definitely give it a try. It's worthwhile to watch.
Happy watching!
Mike's movie moments rating: 4 out of 5 stars
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