Today, I explain how The Blacklist choosing not to recast Elizabeth Keen was such a bad mistake.
This is “Could Have Been Better,” a feature where I note an alternate route that a TV series or film should have gone (and could have easily gone, so no, like, “ER should have not let George Clooney leave”).
SPOILER ALERT FOR THE SERIES FINALE OF THE BLACKLIST
The Blacklist recently came to an end after 10 seasons on NBC, and boy, did the final season sure make it clear that it was a mistake not to just recast Elizabeth Keen when Megan Boone chose to leave the show after eight seasons.
In many ways, Elizabeth Keen was a pretty poorly written TV character, made even more glaring by the fact that James Spader’s Raymond “Red” Reddington was such a GOOD character, so the fact that Liz was a package deal with Red was a bit of a pain in the ass. At the same time, though, the simple fact of the matter is that the show WAS built upon the relationship between Red and Liz, and once she was killed off at the end of Season 8, the show no longer had a purpose.
Season 9 attempted to get around that problem by having the season revolve around the mystery of WHO killed Liz, but once that was done, the show didn’t have an actual PURPOSE anymore, and yet it still went on for another 22 episodes. For eight seasons, the central mystery of the show was why would Reddington, one of the most wanted criminals in the world, choose to turn himself in and begin to work with an FBI Task Force as soon as Elizabeth Keen was made an FBI Agent. Why did Reddington build an entire criminal empire just to protect Liz only for it to end with him…not protecting Liz. And then the shoe went on for two more seasons!
It got to the point in the end where we really didn’t even need to learn Red’s origins, because the only reason the origins mattered was because of how it connected to Liz, and she was long dead, so why bother?
Clearly, the show should have just recast the role. Have Liz get some plastic surgery or whatever. Killing her character off was such a major mistake to the show. It robbed it of its whole purpose, leaving it to sort of just fade away in its 10th season instead.
Okay, this is a bit more of a me-specific topic, but if you’d like to send in suggestions, feel free to drop me a line at brian@popculturereferences.com
I actually profoundly disagree with you Brian on this. I think the character of Liz Keen was a massive weak link in the show and had been a liability for several seasons. There are only so many times when Keen could suddenly oppose Reddington on information given to her by someone else, that she takes at face value, that Red turns out to be completely right about. By the final time– when Liz sided with the alleged Katarina Rostova– I was done with the character. The character had become obsessive and limited.
Recasting the part only would have continued the problem. The fact that Megan Boone wanted to leave was not the issue– though I don’t think Megan Boone was stellar– the problem was the character had been mangled beyond belief by the writers’ need to make her oppose Reddington all the time. It was a writing problem and a producing problem.
For what it’s worth, while I agree the show lost its purpose (and you see that in the finale, which was basically written for the seasons 9 and 10 version of the show), the fact is The Blacklist was 30 times more watchable without Liz Keen as a part of the show.
Part of the problem was Liz’s presence always made the show about the central mystery, but the actual show people came to watch was a lurid procedural crime drama. When the show was at its best, it held those two elements in balance, but the latter half of Liz’s tenure, the mystery was more the thing, while I would argue the last two seasons it was the lurid procedural. And I know which one I prefer.
I was fine with Liz being killed off. For me the most interesting parts of the show were with Dembe and Aram and Cooper and even Wressler, so more for them to do was a good thing. I would have been happier if they used the last half of season 10 to revisit the central mysteries a bit more, but it didn’t need a recast Liz to do that.
The solution there is to just write her better, not break the entire storytelling engine of the series.