The Blacklist's half-animated season finale was inspired by the show's "graphic novel feel"

TVLine

The NBC crime thriller's makeshift Season 7 finale used graphic novel-style animation to complete Episode 19, which was half-finished due to the coronavirus shutdown. The Blacklist originally had been scheduled for 22 episodes this season. "We’ve always talked about The Blacklist being a bit of a comic book," says creator Jon Bokenkamp. "We’ve got a criminal anti-hero at the center of the show. A rogues’ gallery of criminals each week. The show has a slightly alternative graphic novel feel to it that’s baked into what we do week to week. So when we started kicking around ideas for how to complete the season, we looked back at the (Blacklist) comic books written by Nicole Phillips, and an animated approach felt very organic." Did producers have to make any tweaks because of the animation? "We made some slight adjustments to the script, mostly trying to expand concepts that we otherwise wouldn’t have been able to execute on our tight production schedule," says Bokenkamp. "For example, there’s a scene with three characters in the back of a car, racing through the city. In live action, that would have been shot with green screen and we’d be lucky if we ever popped outside of the car. However, with animation — and working with (visual effects company) Proof — we realized we had an opportunity to open that scene up. We jump outside the car to see the vehicle careening through the streets, cars whizzing past, horns blaring. That’s the kind of thing we would never have been able to do where we shoot in New York City."

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• The Blacklist producers learned that even half an episode of animation takes a lot of work: After NBC and Sony Pictures TV signed off on the animation idea, "the producers embarked on a five-week production circus involving multiple timezones, animation studios and sleepless nights," says Variety's Will Thorne. "Here’s how it went down: Animators at Proof, Inc. in both London and Atlanta began working on the 20 minutes of the episode that needed to be animated. After the London team had finished each day of work, (creator Jon) Bokenkamp (who is currently in Nebraska) and (executive producer John) Eisendrath (in Los Angeles) would get up in the morning, go over what had been completed and give notes to their editors, who would then cut the animated frames into what live-action shots had been salvaged. Then in the afternoon, Bokenkamp and Eisendrath would move onto the work coming out of the Atlanta studio. This process would repeat itself 'around the clock' until the episode was finally locked."
• Bokenkamp explains the season finale's epic ending