I’ve never seen The Blacklist, but I’m pretty sure what follows accurately describes the program.

The Blacklist is about a man who tailors high-end suits for criminals and/or spies, and he is required to go to prison because of it. It is wrong to tailor high-end suits for criminals and/or spies and if you do so, you will get in trouble and go to prison.

The Blacklist is a program that manages to strike a balance between the celebration of youth and an admiration for all the wonderful things life experience can offer a person. This is a marginally valuable lesson, but because so few even marginally valuable lessons are available to us in our every day lives—from our books to our films to our long-form audio documentaries—it makes The Blacklist one of the most important cultural products of the last few decades.

Every actor on The Blacklist is required to not just use a prop gun at work, but a very real gun at home. And they must discover novel and unexpected uses for said gun. “I shot the cap off a beer bottle instead of twisting it off.” “I forgot my house keys and shot and shot and shot the door until it surrendered and let me in.” “I used the gun to ‘show’ my kids just how much I ‘love’ and ‘cherish’ them.” They are asked to share their “out of the box” gun ideas with one another at a weekly cast meeting that the producers of the program call NBC’S THE BLACKLIST GUNS CHAT. Because of all this home and workplace gun use, the cast members of The Blacklist have an affinity for handguns that matches or surpasses the gun affinity of every cast in the history of television.

The actor James Spader does not appear in the television program The Blacklist. Instead, there is a thing that looks very much like James Spader. The thing does not speak English—or, in fact, any known human language—even though he appears to on the program. Instead, he makes a series of sounds that approximate English, and the gentle, inviting tone of his voice casts a kind of hypnotic spell on viewers of the program that has led to the collective delusion that he speaks English and that the plots of the program make a reasonable amount of sense.

The Blacklist has a grueling shooting schedule, but everyone who works on it—both in front of and behind the camera—loves that they get to wake up in the morning knowing they are going to spend their day with a group of people they consider not just coworkers, but, really, a kind of family. And family is really important? We spend all our lives in psychic relation to the people we consider our family? We build and destroy all the foundational structures of our lives because of family? WE run screaming from room after room after room to get away from, and into the arms of, family? We buy plots of land and we plant seeds, and we watch those seeds grow, and we harvest the things that have grown in order to feed and care for our family? We froth at the mouth and we rip, tear, and grind with our little red teeth to pulverize into a paste the meat on the bones of the members of our family? Because we love them?

The Blacklist will run for at least 5 seasons.