For 10 years, The Blacklist dominated the crime thriller genre on television, reinventing the rules for what was possible for a small-screen serial drama. Once you’ve finished watching all 218 episodes of the show, it’s hard to know where to go next for something else that can even compare. Luckily, two years after The Blacklist first aired, another crime drama was made for NBC that serves as the perfect complement to James Spader’s most famous TV series. In fact, this show even has its own equivalent to Raymond Reddington.

Although it had a shorter run and is much lower-profile, Blindspot is the perfect fix for fans of The Blacklist who want something else similar to watch. The show centers on a character with a mysterious backstory, which is gradually revealed during the course of the series, partially through repressed memories. Like The Blacklist’s main character Raymond Reddington, this mysterious figure is picked up by the FBI and used to investigate high-level criminals. The two shows are virtually unique in sharing the curious premise of an enigmatic protagonist of dubious origins working with a federal crime agency in this way.

Blindspot Is About A Mysterious Woman Helping The FBI Solve Cases

Jane Doe Is The Show’s Equivalent To Raymond Reddington

The central character of Blindspot is Jane Doe, a woman of unknown identity who’s discovered naked in a duffel bag in the show’s first episode, with no memory of how she got there. Unlike The Blacklist’s Red, Jane Doe (Jaimie Alexander) has no known criminal history, because she has no identifiable history at all. On the other hand, just as The Blacklist conceals who Raymond Reddington really is for much of its run, the mystery of Jane Doe’s true identity is a long-running plot thread in Blindspot.

Likewise, when Jane’s murky backstory begins to be revealed, shocking details about the kind of activity she was involved in come to light. Jane Doe wasn’t sharing any secrets with the Soviets, as Red did before the events of The Blacklist, but she was participating in a regime that committed crimes against humanity.

Jane Doe's Tattoos Are Blindspot's Version Of Raymond Reddington's Blacklist

They Contain Clues To The People & Locations Behind High-Level Crimes & Security Threats

What’s more, Blindspot’s Jane Doe provides the authorities with information via the show’s equivalent to Raymond Reddington’s blacklist. When she’s found, Jane’s body is covered with recently inked tattoos, each of which turns out to be a clue in the hunt for what happened to her, and for dangerous criminals who pose a threat to national security. Almost all the tattoos are indirect allusions that need to be deciphered, with whole episodes of the show sometimes taken up with cracking the encoded message hidden in a single tattoo.

Blindspot is made even more intriguing by the fact that Jane knows just as little as we do about her past and the secret meanings of her tattoos. While The Blacklist’s Red is merely concealing various secrets from us, Blindspot’s protagonist has to work to discover the truth along with the show’s audience.

Blindspot Didn't Run For As Long As The Blacklist, But It's A Great Mystery Show

The Series Ran For 5 Years On NBC, Unraveling Its Mystery Across 100 Episodes

While it’s true that Blindspot didn’t get the acclaim or attention that The Blacklist received during its original run, the show is one of the most fascinating crime thriller series to have premiered on network TV during the past decade. It ran for five seasons between 2015 and 2020 on NBC, with 100 episodes of the series produced in total. MCU star Jaimie Alexander is excellent in the main role as Jane Doe, while Australian actor Sullivan Stapleton features as Blindspot’s other main character, FBI Special Agent Kurt Weller.

For those who love The Blacklist, or who simply enjoy a good, unsettling mystery thriller, Blindspot is certainly worth a try. The show will leave you scratching your head in its first few episodes, but will soon have you hooked into the story of who Jane Doe really is, and what her tattoos are trying to tell us.