‘The Blacklist: Redemption’ Creators: The Spinoff Is ‘Big,’ ‘Crazy,’ ‘Twisted,’ and ‘Peculiar’
Spinoffs are easy these days: If you’re CSI or NCIS or Law and Order, you just bring in a new cast for an episode, then send them off to another department or another state. If you want to do it old school, though, says Jon Bokenkamp, creator of The Blacklist and co-creator of The Blacklist: Redemption, “take a beloved character from the original show and take him or her to a new show” — which is what they’ve done with Ryan Eggold’s Tom Keen. We sat down with Bokenkamp and co-creator John Eisendrath to talk about how this show, set in the world of espionage — “More Mission: Impossible, and The Dirty Dozen, and Alias,” says Eisendrath — differs from the original show and how Tom keeps eluding death.
Redemption is the story of former criminals — Tom Keen, Scottie Hargrave (Famke Janssen), Matias Solomon (Edi Gathegi), and others — taking on impossible spy missions to make up for their past misdeeds. “It’s big. It’s crazy,” says Eisendrath. This show is light in the places where The Blacklist tends toward darkness. “This has a real flash and flair and musical sensibility and scope,” he says. At the same time, Bokenkamp says the small, emotional moments are his favorites. “My hope and desire is that [the audience] really hooks into Tom and Scottie’s very peculiar, curious, twisted, uncertain relationship and go on the journey to find out what that’s going to look like.”
The spinoff almost didn’t happen because Tom almost didn’t make it out of the first episode of The Blacklist. “In the pilot, Tom Keen died. Act 4, he’s dead,” recalls Eisendrath about the original script that they shopped around Hollywood before NBC picked it up. Bokenkamp thinks it’s a TNT executive who suggested that maybe they should keep him around. Then, at the end of Season 1, “John was, like, ‘We’re killing him! Episode 17, he’s going to die. He’s going to die!’”
But something held them back. Part of it was the actor. “[Eggold] had an undeniable energy and force and presence,” says Bokenkamp. “It felt like he was ready to do more and we were ready to write more for him.” Some of that was because Tom Keen existed in a strange middle ground. He wasn’t an FBI agent, but he was more than just the inconsequential husband role. “When we learned who he was,” says Eisendrath, “that he could go undercover, that he could transform and become anybody, that started to feel like a character you might want to watch a show about.”
Eventually, the character evolved to a point where it made sense for him to leave. After all, explains Eisendrath, “It’s superhard because he has a kid now and a woman who he’s actually at a good place in his relationship with — that’s good drama.” And it’s that personal story that drives the show.
Tom and Liz are split apart physically, but not emotionally, Bokenkamp stresses. “For me, the fact that he’s a dad and not a single dad, the fact that he has a real commitment and a desire to be a father, is a very important dimension of who he is,” he says. That willingness to put in the work of being a father is an important point for Bokenkamp: “It centers the show that, ultimately, with all the bells and whistles that it’s going to have, is really about family.”
It’s a very different family drama from that of The Blacklist, though. “What is the relationship between Red and Elizabeth Keen?” asks Eisendrath. “Who is he to her? Why does he care about her? That is something that, really, is a series-long quest for viewers of that show and that character.” Redemption, by contrast, begins with Tom already knowing that Scottie is his mother, and “it’s only a matter of time before she figures out who he is,” Eisendrath says. In other words, the question is the entry point to the show, but they won’t linger on it for long.
The importance of Tom’s daughter, Agnes, is magnified by the presence of his mother, Scottie. “Famke’s very good as this incredibly flawed — as she likes to say — broken character, whose loss of her son when he was 4 has really decimated her inner emotional life,” Bokenkamp says. “[It’s] a character who’s open about her fallibilities, at peace with talking about what she’s afraid of. That, I think, is an incredibly compelling character — [one] who leads with her insecurities, and yet is very powerful.”
How that affected her will, in turn, affect his relationship with his daughter, all while trying to find out just what did happen to him as a child. “One of the big questions at the center of the show,” says Eisendrath, “is, ‘If I didn’t die when I was 4 years old like the newspapers say, what happened? How did I end up here?’” If the run of The Blacklist is any indication, those answers may not be so easy to get.
The Blacklist: Redemption premieres Feb. 23 at 10 p.m. on NBC, after the winter finale of The Blacklist.
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