“We’re on borrowed time”: James Spader Revealed Why The Blacklist Getting Season 11 Never Made Any Sense

James Spader delivered an iconic performance as Raymond “Red” Reddington, the main character in the hit NBC crime-thriller series The Blacklist. The series lasted for ten seasons, airing from 2013 to 2023, attaining Spader critical acclaim for his role. However, Spader was adamant that the series could not continue beyond season 10.

The Blacklist starred James Spader as Red for ten seasons (Credit: NBC).

During an interview, Spader addressed the show’s eventual conclusion with its tenth and final season. At the same time, Spader also addressed the possibility of the series continuing with an eleventh season, which the actor quickly shut down. Here is why Spader thought that The Blacklist was destined to end after almost a decade on air.

The Blacklist Star James Spader Revealed Why the Series Never Got a Season 11 James Spader admitted The Blacklist had changed too much by season 10 (Credit: NBC).

James Spader played Raymond “Red” Reddington,…

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Will There Be A Season 11 Of ‘The Blacklist’?

All good things must come to an end — or they used to, anyway. When a show ends, fans may rally to bring it back. Sometimes it takes awhile. That Frasier reboot took nearly two decades. Suits is already en route to returning, if as a Meghan Markle-less spinoff, after the show blew up on Netflix over the summer. Last year The Blacklist concluded after 10 seasons. That doesn’t mean it’s gone for good.

So: Will The Blacklist ever get a Season 11?

The answer, for now, is: nope. That could change down the line; again, dead shows get exhumed all the time, long after they ended. But when The Blacklist let James Spader’s FBI-cooperating fugitive finally retire after a decade, creator Jon Bokenkamp made clear they were going out on top, as he told NBC Insider:

“After 10 years, hundreds of Blacklist cases, and more than 200 episodes produced, we’re honored to reach our conclusion. It’s been incredibly fun to create the strange, devious, and delightful Blacklisters to challenge Raymond Reddington and our FBI Task Force each week. We would like to thank everyone at NBC and Sony, our extraordinary crew who make the impossible happen every day, our endlessly inventive writers and producers, and our remarkable cast who brought life to these characters. We appreciate our dedicated fanbase who came along for this wonderful ride and are excited to share this final season with them.”

Spader himself seemed reluctant to push any further. “If the show went beyond this year, it would turn into a very different show,” he told NBC Insider. He added that any subsequent Blacklist seasons would be very un-Blacklist-y:

“I think if the show went beyond this year, it would turn into a very different show. And I think that the thing that has been nice about this show was that we’ve never really had a really clear paradigm for the show. Tonally the show shifts a lot from episode to episode, and I think that even the show has taken strange turns, and I suspect that the show, if it went much further, would just become something that would be less recognizable to me.

Again, that doesn’t mean Season 11 or whatever they’d call it won’t happen. Five years, 10 years down the line, Raymond Reddington and his black get-up may be back on screens.