Hi @theblacklistunsolved and @alyblacklist!
Everything Aly said is basically correct! The writers work from roughly June to March -- next week is actually my last week of hiatus before I go back for season 9 (!). So to not correct anything, but simply add on:
So the first month or so is talking about the overall scope of the season. By the time we really get started on individual episodes, we know what we want to hit at the beginning, midseason (where there is often a “midseason finale” but sometimes not -- not a writer’s room decision) and end. Which is not to say that the final script is written, but we know roughly what is going to happen in it. I would say it would be EXTREMELY uncommon for a 22-episode show to have all of its episodes done before you start filming -- that’s more of a limited series, 6-episode kind of thing (which is a fairly recent type of television).
Then we get into pitching -- we go in chunks of like 5 or 6ish? So the J’s will decide what the first episode or three is, and then we’ll all pitch individual Blacklisters. Getting your Blacklister picked for an episode is a lucky combination of 1) They think the Blacklister is cool + 2) They have an idea for how that Blacklister fits into the overall story. We’ll spend one or two days just everyone pitching their ideas, then the J’s will go away for a bit, decide the 5ish ideas they liked and in what order they want them to go, and come back and tell us what the next run of episodes is and who is writing them. If your idea was picked, you go into high gear working with the J’s on the outline and script, and everyone else helps out those people and also starts working on new ideas for the next pitch day after those episodes are written. Repeat repeat repeat until the end of the season! This is part of what I really love about television -- the way lots of people contribute to the story and together you come up with something none of you could have come up with on your own. The J’s have their idea for the big scope of the season, which inspires the writers on ideas for Blacklisters, which inspires the J’s for individual steps in the story...I just think it’s so cool. The Park storyline this season actually came out of something I pitched, though if you were to read my original pitch it would be totally unrecognizable (one day after the show is over, ask me about it at a convention or something). But I had an idea for a story, that then several other people added onto and tweaked in different ways, and then it became the thing you saw on television. Something exists because of an idea I had -- that’s the kind of thing that still makes me pinch myself that I have this awesome job. :)
The script is usually “finalized” one production cycle ahead of it being made -- this is called “pre-production” or “prep.” (Finalized in quotes, because there are lots of practical changes that happen at this stage -- maybe we had envisioned a character as a man but a really great woman auditioned so we want to tweak the character, or we wrote a scene in an ice cream shop but we couldn’t find a good one to film at but we did get a cool roller rink*, or whatever) This is when the director gets onboard and we start casting, looking for locations, working out the schedule, building props, choosing costumes, etc, etc, etc. At any given time, we have one episode in prep and one episode in production (filming). We actually have two teams for many of our departments, “evens” and “odds” so that the even team can be prepping their next episode while the odd team is filming and vice versa. I would say the prep/production cycle is pretty much the rule as to how TV is made, though it’s not always evens and odds -- when I was an assistant on Maron, we shot two episodes at a time, so while we were filming episodes 1 and 2, we were prepping episodes 3 and 4 and so on. Maron did actually write all of the episodes each season before they started shooting, but that was for the very practical reason that the showrunner was also the lead actor (but you could get away with that because it was only 13 half-hour episodes, so we shot the whole season in under three months, as opposed to the Blacklist which shoots nearly all year long).
Uh does that answer everyone’s questions? Haha. I might have given everyone waaay more than anyone actually wanted.
Also yeah! Sorry I missed the livetweet today. I have a very small window between “fully vaccinated and can see people” and “end of summer vacation” so I’ve been trying to make the most of it! Ironically, I might miss the last two episodes for the opposite reason -- they air at 5pm (PST) on a workday and we usually don’t break until 6pm. I could reliably count on us breaking early on Fridays, but I’m not sure if we will on Wednesdays, especially with 821 airing in the middle of our first week back! So I’m going to have to play it by ear!
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