Hacker Cinema
The Blacklist
2013 · TV series · 10 seasons
Created by Jon Bokenkamp
Raymond "Red" Reddington, one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives, surrenders in person at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. He claims that he and the FBI have the same interests: bringing down dangerous criminals and terrorists. In the last two decades, he's made a list of criminals and terrorists that matter the most but the FBI cannot find because it does not know they exist. Reddington calls this "The Blacklist". Reddington will co-operate, but insists that he will speak only to Elizabeth Keen, a rookie FBI profiler.
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21 comments on Hacker News
I would recommend the Assimil language courses, very good if you consistently do it every day, they're also not too expensive. Like 75 bucks last i checked, and that'll keep you busy for 90+ days.
Assimil says it can get you to a b1/b2-ish level, which i think is about where it takes you. I did their German course a long time ago, and was able to read paragraphs and understand them just fine by the end of it(didn't keep up with German, so that skill has atrophied.
After finishing Assimil, i would watch a tv show you've already watched but now in french. Ie: go to Netflix or Prime(which in my experience have the most language options) and watch Friends, 24, The Blacklist, Seinfeld etc etc whatever you can think of, in French, it'll help a lot, and make acquiring vocab easier. Native language content can sometimes be a bit harder to grasp because of cultural events/history you may not be familiar with yet.
But French language content I have enjoyed in the past are the podcasts "Podcast Marketing Digital"(also a youtube channel), deux mille ans d'histoire(history podcast)
Try this: look up the most highly rated episodes on IMDB and watch only those. Missing the crummy episodes usually does not interfere with understanding the story arc. Often, I set a minimum IMDB score that I will watch, like 8.5 or 9.0 to capture only the best. This works well with series that:
- take a year or two to find their footing or
- have a large cast (some mediocre) that get their own story lines of no consequence occasionally or
- introduce cast members that don't make it or
- implode towards the final season.
I have done this for many series that are somewhat uneven:
- The Americans
- How I Met Your Mother
- Fringe
- Orphan Black
- Halt and Catch Fire
- House of Cards (watching the ratings allows you to miss all of season 6)
- Arrested Development
- Bojack Horseman
- Veep
- 30 Rock
- Jane the Virgin
- Black Mirror
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- Suits
- Six Feet Under
- La Femme Nikita
- The Blacklist
- Peaky Blinders
- The Romanoffs
- Ozark
- Westworld (sometimes dropping episodes does not matter)
- Succession
- Borgen
And all of these series have lots of strong episodes.
Series I would not do this with:
- The Bear
- Breaking Bad
- Money Heist
- The Serpent
- Fleabag
- Chernobyl
- The White Lotus
I really enjoyed this, well done. I love that there were surprises like the LOST finale not being as bad as you thought (statistically).
Some obligatory personal hot takes:
- the Scrubs finale should be considered the last episode of season 8 (which was great). Season 9 should be considered a spinoff series.
- The Blacklist recently aired the series finale and I would consider it a disaster finale. It has ruined the series for me, and I no longer recommend it to friends.
- I think most comedies aren’t ruined by a series finale. That’s probably due to the character over plot idea, as there usually isn’t a storyline I’m dying to finish.
I noticed that the watchtime of `You` was split half-and-half between the new season 4 and the prior seasons 1-3. I was curious about the total results by show, including all seasons. Here's the top 25:
TITLE TOTAL HRS WATCHED ----- ----------------- Ginny & Georgia 967,200,000 The Night Agent 812,100,000 You 766,300,000 Outer Banks 740,400,000 The Walking Dead 738,600,000 The Glory 622,800,000 La Reina del Sur 616,800,000 CoComelon 601,200,000 Suits (2011) 599,100,000 The Blacklist 596,900,000 Manifest 581,900,000 Grey's Anatomy 560,300,000 Wednesday 507,700,000 Gilmore Girls 505,800,000 Breaking Bad 505,000,000 Queen Charlotte 503,000,000 Friends (1994) 448,500,000 Love Is Blind 439,300,000 Lucifer 434,300,000 The Big Bang Theory 420,400,000 Shameless (U.S.) 392,600,000 PAW Patrol 392,300,000 New Amsterdam (2018) 375,500,000 Brooklyn Nine-Nine 358,900,000 Firefly Lane 342,700,000
That would be an interesting production skill for an org to build out. I don't think anyone is really good at it and wind-down seasons are all over the place. Freed from the need to fit into the season templates you could also wind shows down with partial seasons or even an audiobook.
2 fun examples of coping with winding down are HBO's Rome, that "telescoped the third and fourth season into the second one" (https://www.reuters.com/article/televisionNews/idUSTRE4B00VV20081201/) and Blacklist's final episode before the pandemic shutdown that filled the gaps with animated storyboards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0nF4njky94
It's a poor approach for people like me. My main thing is video games, youtube, and reading. But I like really good TV series. I've enthusiastically watched Peaky Blinders as soon as it's available after I heard about it and picked it up after season 4. I didn't start watching Breaking Bad until Season 4 finished airing. Same with a bunch of other shows, Blacklist (S6), Game of Thrones (S4), Sherlock(S5), Mandalorian (S2), Ozarks (S3). That doesn't give a lot of shows time to catch my eye.
The ones I recall watching after S1 aired over the past decade are Fargo, Better Call Saul (because I saw BB), True Detective, House of Cards, Atlanta (because I'm from Atlanta), Lupin, because they got truly rave reviews. I'm even more conservative with Netflix shows now because it's pretty much a given that anything I even attempt to watch is going to get cancelled after a season or 2.
>And they might not 'advertise' the usual products.
Based on my recent viewing history (mostly old Star Trek, first season of Blacklist and the Inspiration Four documentary) I'm struggling to see what those might be.
The basic problem is understanding WHY I liked something. If I watch Tintin because it’s a cozy throwback to my childhood, that does not mean I would like every single Studio Ghibli movie in my recommendations.
Similarly, if I play Blacklist in the background as basically noise, I don’t want to see a bunch of related shows. I guess I could give it a thumbs down but I only do that for actually terrible movies.
Also Spotify and Apple music seem to have okay recommendations
In the UK, Doctor Who is clearly an outlier. The other really long-running shows are soap operas like Eastenders or comedy panel shows.
But in the US, there seem to be an awful lot of outliers, and it's on the strength of those series that Netflix initially established their following: Friends, The Office, Park and Rec, Seinfeld, Community, The Walking Dead, The Blacklist, Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, West Wing, That 70's Show, Supernatural, Criminal Minds, and I could keep going, honestly, for quite a while.
So yes, there's an extent to which 5 or 8 seasons is less common, but the goal for US shows has been 100 episodes for decades now, which is usually 5 seasons of 20+ episodes each.
If Netflix is adopting a more UK-like approach, that might result in better TV eventually, but it would be nice for creators to know they have to tell their story in 16 episodes rather than 100.
We're reaching some sort of apex of a cycle of hysteria. It reminds me of the McMartin preschool trial (Satanic ritual abuse, etc.) in LA in the 90s.
This week, one of our management, with choked emotion, declared that further use of the word "blacklist" would be a firing offense. (We do Linux, which uses it all over the place, so there's no way to not use this word in our work.)
Anyway, I don't follow things that closely, and googled this apparently heinous term. First result? A fucking TV show, that's still on, and has been on for years!
I'm too old for this shit.
The latest episode of Blacklist had a dark plot based on deep-fakes.
On the subject of the dangers of deepfakes, the most recent episode of The Blacklist addressed deepfakes in a storyline I found quite interesting.
Basically (spoilers ahead), this researcher creates a sentient AI and the AI promptly decides that sentient AI is a danger to humanity and tries to kill a few of the top AI researchers. Ok, kinda unrealistic.
The more realistic part? To get one of the AI researchers killed, a deepfake video is created of that researcher saying something along the lines of "over the years at X corp I've seen the worst of humanity, too much evil, it's time to end it all" accompanied by him strapping on a bomb vest. The video is released and everyone freaks out. He doesn't notice, goes to work, gets surrounded by cops while holding a small black device (his phone), and the police shoot and kill him thinking it's a detonator.
I'd always considered deepfakes in the context of making false political statements which could eventually be disproved. Worst case, a bunch of people think the wrong thing for a while. This use case of forcing rapid response without time for validation or refutal is quite a bit scarier and one I personally hadn't considered before.
> However lately Netflix' content simply seems to lack substance to me.
I want to echo this as well. One thing about American TV content is that the story plot is very repetitive in nature. Netflix and other similar providers' original contents are very much either a superhero or a crime chaser plot. Furthermore I also dislike breaking content into seasons. It keeps audience around so more money but I am just very inpatient when it comes to TV content. In China / Hong Kong, most drama do not release in parts. So say there are 40 episodes it will have 40 episodes completed when the drama is aired. When you drag your drama plot beyond season 3 the story gets boring. Walking Dead, House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, Blacklist, dragging on.
I want some more refreshing content. This is why I love cartoon contents like Bob's Burger or watching documentary. I get some breathing room.
Usually I'm on the 'giving' side of that dynamic (unintentionally), but I was watching the final episode of The Blacklist the other day and in it some American bad guy is thrown out of a plan over The Netherlands. The house they show him landing in is a throwback to 200 years ago, complete with a woman with covered head and wooden beams in the walls. It's around 3:14 in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ISzOGRgIWI . It's hilarious that someone on the production team would actually think this is anywhere near realistic; or maybe it's just hilarious that they thought most American viewers would think a Dutch house would look like that.
(maybe the guy just accidentally landed in an outdoor museum...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blacklist_(TV_series)
It's almost as if this TV series was written with Le Roux in mind.
And yet, have you seen the 4k content out there? Breaking Bad was awesome, but is that really better in 4k than, say BSG or Planet Earth? I bought a 4k TV to use as a monitor several months back and started researching content - Most of it is eyebrow-raising, to say the least. I remember when 720/1080 were first introduced, there was an expected dearth of content, but at least what was out there was worth high-def (flyovers of tourist destinations, PBS nature documentaries, etc). For example - Here's some of Netflix's offerings in 4k:
Series: House of Cards Marco Polo Breaking Bad The Blacklist
Movies and Documentaries Smurfs 2 Philadelphia Jerry Macguire Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Oceans (documentary) Forests (documentary) Flowers (documentary)
Edit:formatting
My wife and I like to watch shows like Blacklist and White Collar. There are casual 4th amendment violations several times per episode. It's infuriating.
It's the beginning of a Blacklist episode called "the fisherman".
I also was drawn in by the title but the ending made me very sad for those people. Reality is far harsher than any fiction.
I've been watching season 1 of "The Blacklist" in the background while working over the weekend. Aside from being yet more terror porn, one of the interesting subplots had a rogue unit surveilling the FBI. The implication was clear: these bad guys are so cool and awesome that they can run their own surveillance! Against us!
But really, not so much. If you really wanted to gather a whole bunch of secret data on what the government was doing? You wouldn't need to set up cameras and monitor everything. You wouldn't need some super-cool intercept site located in Virginia. The government has already done that for you. All you need to do is break in and scoop up data like every other subscriber is doing -- just like what happened with the recent breech at OPM. (Which, being the biggest heist in American intelligence history, is amazingly under-reported)
As this article points out, people seem to lose sight of the fact that by putting all of our eggs in one basket, we just make it easier for somebody to rob us of all of our eggs. Backdoors are a horrible idea. I agree with the author here that the reasoning displayed on these editorial pages is "breaktakingly stupid"
Aside from the fact that the security state is destroying the republic, there are some seriously ignorant people making broad decisions about a lot of things they should just stay away from.
A simple "no, I don't actually know" would have sufficed.
I'm not asking you what episode of Blacklist you enjoyed the most, I'm asking you about real life. The lavabit company was served a real warrant made by a real judge, served by a real officer of the court. NSLs are served by real FBI agents with real badges. I'm not debating the anti-liberty essence of an NSL, but the "men in black" fear is completely unfounded by the domain of things that are in the public eye.
The strawman of the "FCK agency" agents ordering people with the threat of jail time to put backdoors in their software isn't backed up by any credible fact. We can suppose and assume all day, but you shouldn't take it for granted that everyone agrees or should agree with you.
*the alleged RSA backdoor was reported by Reuters to be a $10M bribe, doesn't sound coercive to me. Not to mention the NSA has no arrest powers outside its facilities, but sure.
This is pretty much the plot of the two most recent episodes of The BlackList.
http://www.nbc.com/the-blacklist