On Friday May 15, NBC aired the season 7 finale of Sony Pictures Television's “The Blacklist” in an unprecedented move regarding production – the scenes from this final episode were made in animation format, as a replacement for the scenes that could not be recorded due to the suspension of production as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
That risky move transformed the finale into a hybrid episode of live action and graphic novel-style animation. The planned 22-episode season turned into a 19-episode season, but having the seventh season finished on time was vital to make way for the eighth, which is supposed to arrive at some point in 2021. This final episode will air in Latin America on Thursday, June 18 at 10 pm on AXN.
“When we decided to try and finish the episode that was only halfway finished when we had to shut down production in March because of the pandemic, we pretty quickly decided that trying to animate the portion of the episode that wasn't finished might be natural for us to do because the show had that style,” said John Eisendrath, one of the executive producers and showrunners of the show, during a conference call.
After it aired, The Nielsen ratings found that this hybrid season 7 finale of “The Blacklist” gattered nearly 4.1 million viewers in the United States, down slightly from the previous episode. This gives the series’ creators a lot of credit for taking this smart and creative solution to a wicked problem.
“I would say that we enjoyed everything about doing animation. We didn't know anything about animation before we did this. We didn't know how the process worked or anything, so it was a great learning experience for us to understand how animators work and it was incredibly exciting to both watch the animation get done and to realize how much freedom we had to make choices in the animated portions of the episode that we could never have made in the live action portion,” Eisendrath admitted.
“The Blacklist” follows Raymond Reddington (James Spader), a former military officer turned criminal, who voluntarily surrenders to the FBI and offers his services as an informant of the most dangerous criminals in the world — his blacklist. He insists on working exclusively with one particular FBI profiler by the name of Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). Through seven seasons, questions remained as to why Reddington wanted Keen as his partner.
“We did make small adjustments in Episode 19, which was never intended to be our finale. I think we did make some adjustments so that it's a little more of a cliff hanger, it's a little more of a throw-forward into next season, into the 8th season, and I think it's a really good ending to the season,” added Jon Bokenkamp, executive producer and showrunner of the show.