The Irrational arrived in primetime as one of the few new shows in the final months of the 2023 TV schedule, with former Law & Order actor Jesse L. Martin in the lead role. The show premiered just months after The Blacklist ended as one of NBC's longest-running shows, with the finale finishing the story of James Spader's Reddington after ten seasons and more than 200 episodes. John Terlesky directed many episodes of The Blacklist over the years – including the milestone 200th – before coming to The Irrational, and reflected on that experience in an interview with CinemaBlend.
John Terlesky directed eleven episodes of The Blacklist going back to 2016, and he was back with NBC by the fall for the third episode of The Irrational. Coming into a brand new show like The Irrational is of course very different from directing the 200th episode of another show, and the director shared:
It's always nice to do that on a new show. I've had the opportunity to do it a couple times, and this is a really good group of people. The cast is super. They're very professional. They're all very enthusiastic about the show. It's always great being early on in something because the paint's not dry yet and everybody's kind of willing to experiment and find out what works. I always enjoy that on a new show. On this show, in particular, it was just a terrific group of people. All the producers in Canada, the DP that I worked with in Canada, terrific guy. Everybody's very enthusiastic and wanting to really make the best show possible.
John Terlesky's comments echo what fellow director Jesse Warn said about working with Jesse L. Martin and The Irrational team for Alec Mercer's life-or-death situation. Terlesky previously opened up about the perks of working on The Irrational early on to build up Martin's "rock star vibe" as Alec. But what about working on The Blacklist over the years, with James Spader playing a very different kind of character?
The Blacklist hit 200 episodes with time to spare in Season 10, with John Terlesky directing for his eleventh and final installment of the NBC drama. Shortly before the broadcast in March, actor Stacy Keach opened up about the show getting "diabolical" with Reddington, and the episode drew on a lot of background between Red and Vesco.
John Terlesky reflected on Episode 200 of The Blacklist, in contrast to Episode 3 of The Irrational:
By the time you get into Season 10 of a show and Episode 200, it's sort of the opposite. The paint is all dry. Blacklist was a great experience... I've done a lot of Blacklist, and it was always a great place to go. I'd worked with James for the first time way back on Boston Legal so I've known him for a while and I've always had a good relationship with him. By the time you get to Season 10, everybody sort of knows their job and everybody sort of is on, I wouldn't say autopilot, but they're used to doing things a certain way, and that's what I was saying earlier.
The director's professional relationship with James Spader goes all the way back to Boston Legal, where he directed three episodes between 2006-2007. The Blacklist team had "a certain way" of doing things by the time they hit 200 episodes, and that way obviously worked well for the show to last as long as it did. The Irrational is well away from hitting any kind of triple-digit milestone, and Terlesky elaborated on why that's exciting:
With a show that's new like this one, the paint is not dry and everybody's still sort of willing to experiment and the show is finding itself and you're trying things and the crew is excited and the cast is excited. I started out acting and when I was an actor, I used to always love it when they would say, 'We need to shoot the rehearsal. We're in a hurry. We got to shoot the rehearsal.' That was always my favorite thing, because you never knew what was going to happen. It's sort of like that with this, when a show is new, you just don't know what's gonna happen. You've got this sense of excitement and sense of possibility all the time, which is really fun.
While The Irrational is already delving into Alec's backstory and the traumatic event that left him permanently scarred, there is still a whole lot of space to explain all of the characters this early in the series. Hopefully the show is enough of a hit for NBC that it has a chance of reaching Blacklist-level success... although fans have had mixed feelings about the series finale. Personally, one powerful scene narrated by Dembe made the tear-jerker work for me!
For now, you can revisit the first nine seasons of The Blacklist streaming with a Netflix subscription, and every episode of The Irrational so far with a Peacock Premium subscription. New episodes of The Irrational with Jesse L. Martin air on Mondays at 10 p.m. ET, so be sure to tune in while the drama is still in its early days!
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