The Blacklist Season 5 Release Date, Trailer, Cast, and News

While spinoff attempt Blacklist: Redemption didn’t make it, the original show will be back. The Blacklist Season 5 will definitely happen on NBC in the Fall. The only catch? It’s coming to a new night.

The Blacklist has always aired on Thursday nights at 10, but things will be a little different next time around. The Blacklist Season 5 will move to Wednesdays when it returns in the Fall. And yes, James Spader will be back as Red Reddington. Of course he is, right? He is this show!

The Blacklist Season 5 News

Warning: SPOILERS ahead for the November 15 midseason finale!

While The Blacklist teased a Season 5 return that would be liberated from most of its old secrets and touted more “fun,” the November 15 midseason finale, “Ian Garvey (No. 13),” proved to be a ruthlessly dark episode that reshaped the foundation of the series itself.

Ryan Eggold’s Tom Keen, Elizabeth’s secrets-hiding husband, a mainstay on the series and even the central character of last season’s failed spinoff attempt, The Blacklist: Redemption, is… gulp, dead! Moreover, in a move mirroring fellow NBC drama Blindspot, the series has initiated a time-jump, in this case, by nearly a year.

Tom spent the first half of Season 5 on a secret investigation of the human remains inside a mysterious briefcase connected to Reddington’s past, which ruffled the wrong feathers and recently cost their surgeon friend Nik (Piter Marek) his life. The endeavor subsequently put Tom in the crosshairs of the dangerous gangster, Ian Garvey (Jonny Coyne), and ultimately got more innocents killed, Liz kidnapped and left comatose from a head injury and, after some lengthy battles, saw him succumb to multiple stab wounds to the gut.

While the notion of a character of Tom’s caliber getting abruptly killed off on The Blacklist might be met with cynicism from the viewers, especially after the series previously faked Elizabeth’s death for a span of episodes, it appears that no life-saving swerve is planned this time. As series creator Jon Bokenkamp confirms to TV Line, stating with no ambiguity whatsoever:

“He is dead. Yes, Tom is gone. He has met his maker.”

With Tom out of the picture, the series heads into Season 5B with room for the larger narrative pertaining to the evolving relationship between Reddington and (revealed daughter) Liz. The sudden shock of losing Tom – the one thing that made her happy – and waking up after spending nearly a year in a coma, means more potentially game-changing content ahead, especially regarding the contents of the troublesome mysterious briefcase.

As Bokenkamp explains of the upcoming altered series dynamic for Season 5B:

“[Liz] wants nothing more than to be normal and have a normal life. And yet, she’s been sucked into this world that she’s having a hard time fighting back against. That, more than anything, will be something that Liz and Red will have to confront. It’s not only [about] why Tom died and who is behind his death and the more surface-level questions that we’ll confront about what really happened. But deeper than that, the bigger question is: Who is Elizabeth Keen?”

The Blacklist Season 5 Release Date

The series will return from its midseason hiatus to a significantly altered playing field on NBC on January 3, 2018.

The 22-episode run of The Blacklist Season 5 premiered back on September 27.

The Blacklist Season 5 Trailer

Here’s Blacklist Season 5 trailer. Based on what we’re seeing, the series goes into Season 5 with James Spader’s Raymond Reddington in an oddly satisfied place. While the culminating moments of Season 4 saw his criminal empire crumbled from within due to the vengeful actions of his now-deceased former colleague Mr. Kaplan (Susan Blommaert), Reddington appears in the Season 5 trailer as a man who’s had a tremendous weight lifted. This is likely because the truth finally surfaced that he is, indeed, the father of his FBI fixation Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone), allowing him – and the series itself – to forgo innuendo when it comes to their relationship and focus on fun – deadly fun, anyway.

The Blacklist Season 5 Cast

Enrique Murciano, who recurred last season, will not return for The Blacklist Season 5. The actor himself confirms this on Twitter.

Murcianao, known from television runs on Bloodline, Hap and Leonard, Power and CSI, arrived on The Blacklist in Season 4 as FBI agent Julian Gale, an old colleague of the Blacklist task force team member Donald Ressler (Diego Klattenhoff). However, Gale quickly became a thorn in the side of Ressler and the task force after his white-whale-like obsession to hunt down the team’s key asset in informant/criminal-extraordinaire Raymond Reddington created a conflict of interest between punitive principles and the show’s Reddington-centric secret FBI operation, which potentially helps the greater good.

Ryan Eggold returned to the core cast for the new season after spinoff prospects with his Tom Keen character on The Blacklist: Redemption failed to catch fire. However, events during the midseason finale proved that his run wouldn’t continue for long.

Aida Turturro joins The Blacklist Season 5 for a recurring role as Hawkins, reports EW. The character is described as a brilliant accountant for “an unusual business,” who flips on a loathed former business partner, now cooperating with the Bureau (an act that would be unfathomable to her former Sopranos character).

Turturro is best known for her role on HBO’s The Sopranos as Janice Soprano, the flighty, manipulative sister of protagonist mob boss Tony Soprano.  She’s also fielded recurring television runs on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, ER and The Wright Verdicts, as well as recent guest spots on Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, Grey’s Anatomy and The Night Of.  

Michael Aronov also joins the series, recurring as Smokey Putnum. The character, described as “an expert in the art of science and logistics,” is a former colleague of Hawkins’s, having run the aforementioned “unusual business.” However, Putnum is in a predicament, finding himself on the run after having embezzled over $2 million.

Aronov, a 2017 Tony Award winner for his role in the play Oslo, is known in the realm of television from his lengthy run on FX’s The Americans as Anton Baklanov, an unlucky Soviet expat scientist who was brought back to the motherland by force. Aronov also fielded guest roles on series such as Madame Secretary, Quantico, Reign, Elementary, Person of Interest, The Closer and Law & Order. Interestingly, he appeared in the 2014 crime drama film The Drop, opposite Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace and, coincidentally, The Sopranos star James Gandolfini (in a posthumous performance).