"I think if the show went beyond this year, it would turn into a very different show," James said in an interview with NBC. "And I think that the thing that has been nice about this show was that we’ve never really had a really clear paradigm for the show. Tonally the show shifts a lot from episode to episode, and I think that even the show has taken strange turns, and I suspect that the show, if it went much further, would just become something that would be less recognizable to me."

With consistent cast and crew departures in recent years, the series’ cancellation makes sense. However, The Blacklist’s creators are determined to go out with a bang.