It’s a little hard to believe it was a decade ago that Jon Bokenkamp created The Blacklist for the TV schedule. At the time, we were in the middle of a wave of big names making returns to TV, and James Spader fit the bill perfectly. The former The Practice and Boston Legal star had signed on the dotted line to play Raymond ‘Red’ Reddington in what would become another career-defining role. Ten years later, the finale wrapped with a tear-jerking Reddington moment that paid off years of storytelling in spades. But should the show have ended far earlier? If you were to ask the cast, they might say they were “surprised” about what happened.
Harry Lennix, who played Harold Cooper for a whopping 218 episodes of The Blacklist, recently opened up about the series finally wrapping. The actor gave a lot of credit to the fanbase for helping the show stick around – even sticking it out through varying timeslots, including that Friday death slot for a while. The show persevered, but the actor says that in some ways it was very surprising the NBC drama lasted as long as it did, as he told NBC:
