We live in the BuzzFeed age, when news is routinely atomised and reconstituted into lip-smacking info-snacks of bullet points and "bants". If it was truly on-trend, Sky's latest US import would be called The Blacklisticle: 13 Super-Secret Crims The FBI Could Never Catch Until This Dude Showed Up. For now, the more prosaic but still evocative title is The Blacklist (Friday, 9pm, Sky Living). Some people who have seen the trailers would probably just call it "That Silence Of The Lambs knock-off". But those people would be a smidge unfair.
Primarily, The Blacklist is a delivery system for the breezy deviancy of James Spader. For the last decade or so, Spader has been digging his own eccentric TV furrow, winning Emmys for cavorting with William Shatner on Boston Legal and playing a divisive boss on The Office. Here, he strolls into FBI headquarters wearing a natty fedora and flashing a passport that identifies him as Raymond "Red" Reddington, former company man turned preternaturally swanky crime fixer. (As you might expect for red-flagged Red, everyone with a badge goes straight to Defcon Gun.)
