TV Shows Like The Blacklist
If you like The Blacklist, here are 11 similar TV shows — each with its current AI renewal verdict, so you can see which are still going and which have been cancelled.
NBC · Drama · The Blacklist is ended
The Blacklist works because of Raymond Reddington. He is charming, ruthless, and almost always the smartest person in the room, and the show is smart enough to keep him that way. The procedural hook, a new criminal from the list each week, gives the series a reliable structure, but the real draw is the ongoing mystery around Reddington's past and his inexplicable fixation on Elizabeth Keen. Fans come for the cases and stay for the mythology.
The best shows like The Blacklist
1. Criminal Minds
Criminal Minds puts a full team of FBI behavioral analysts at the center, so fans of Keen's profiling work will feel right at home. The show has a genuine interest in how criminal psychology operates, and the ensemble gives it more emotional range than a typical procedural. It is formulaic in structure, but the character work in the BAU is strong enough that the formula rarely feels like a limitation.
Stream on Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential
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2. The X-Files
Like The Blacklist, The X-Files runs on the tension between a true believer and a skeptic, and on the slow accumulation of a government mythology that never quite reveals all its cards. Mulder and Scully have the same off-balance partnership dynamic that Reddington and Keen do, with one party always holding information the other doesn't have. The paranormal cases add a layer of strangeness that The Blacklist occasionally reaches for in its more operatic villain episodes.
Stream on Hulu
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3. The Following
Joe Carroll is the closest thing television has produced to a Reddington-style antagonist who operates from inside a cell, orchestrating chaos through charm and intellect rather than direct action. The dynamic between Carroll and Hardy mirrors the Reddington-Keen relationship in its psychological intensity and its murky questions about who is really in control. Fans who liked the way The Blacklist uses its villain as a dark mirror for its protagonist will find a lot to chew on here.
Stream on Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
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4. Absentia
Absentia takes the FBI agent premise and strips it down to something rawer and more personal, following a woman who returns from the dead to find her entire life has been rebuilt without her. The mystery of what really happened to her carries the same slow-burn dread as the questions surrounding Reddington's past. It is a shorter, tighter watch, and fans who found Keen's personal losses more interesting than the weekly blacklister will respond to it.
Stream on Netflix, Netflix Standard with Ads
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5. Profiler
Profiler centers on a criminal profiler working within an FBI task force, which maps almost directly onto Keen's role in The Blacklist. The show has a recurring antagonist dynamic that gives it a serialized spine beyond the individual cases, a structure Blacklist fans will recognize immediately. It is older and less glossy, but the core appeal, a profiler who gets inside dangerous minds while managing a complicated personal life, is exactly the same.
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More on shows like The Blacklist
That combination, a procedural frame with a serialized character mystery underneath it, is specific enough that fans of The Blacklist tend to want the same thing from their next show: a central relationship that feels slightly off-balance, authority figures who bend rules, and at least one character who seems to know far more than they are letting on. A pure case-of-the-week show is too thin; a slow-burn serialized drama with no genre energy is too heavy. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.
The five shows recommended here hit different parts of that sweet spot. Criminal Minds and Profiler both lean into the FBI profiler side of things, giving fans the forensic psychology and behavioral analysis that make Keen's job interesting. The Following is the closest tonal match to The Blacklist, pairing a charismatic, literary villain with a dogged federal investigator in a cat-and-mouse structure that escalates episode by episode. Absentia goes darker, centering on an FBI agent whose personal life has been destroyed by the cases she worked, which will resonate with anyone who found Keen's increasingly complicated existence gripping. The X-Files is the outlier in terms of genre, but it has the same DNA: two federal agents, a mountain of institutional secrets, and a mythology arc that rewards long-term viewers even when individual episodes vary in quality.
None of these shows are exactly The Blacklist, and that is fine. What they share is a core belief that the investigator and the investigation are inseparable, that the person doing the work is as interesting as the work itself. If Reddington's monologues and Keen's growing moral ambiguity are what kept you watching, at least two or three of these will scratch the same itch.
More shows like The Blacklist
Frequently asked
- What is the most popular show like The Blacklist?
- Criminal Minds is the most popular show similar to The Blacklist in the IsItRenewed catalogue.
- Are shows like The Blacklist still on the air?
- Of the 11 shows similar to The Blacklist listed here, 1 currently carry a renewed verdict — the rest are cancelled, ended, or awaiting a decision.
- How does IsItRenewed pick shows like The Blacklist?
- The recommendations come from TMDB's similar-titles data, and each is shown with its current AI renewal verdict so you know which are still going.