‘The Blacklist’ Season 6 Premiere Will Air Over 2 Nights

The Season 6 premiere of The Blacklist will air in an unexpected way, taking place over two nights rather than one.

According to Deadline, the series will return for a two hour premiere on Jan. 3 after the new competition series The Titan Games, which is hosted by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The Blacklist season premiere will then continue the following night, Jan. 4, and move to its regular Friday night schedule after that.

The Blacklist stars James Spader, Megan Boone, Diego Klattenhoff, Ryan Eggold, Harry Lennix, Amir Arison, Mozhan Marnò, and Hisham Tawfiq.

In an interview with The New York Times earlier this year, Spader spoke about the series and opened up about what he feels keeps fans coming back season after season, saying that he thinks its the “many twists and turns.”

“When I first read the script, at the end I realized I knew less about the character than when I first started reading. And I thought, ‘What a great trick that is’ — to retain a certain enigmatic aspect,” he went on to say. “It felt like the premise was perfectly suited to go in any direction and somehow find its way back on track again.”

He later said that he would like to see his character Raymond “Red” Reddington take a “surprising” turn.

“I’ll tell you something funny. I didn’t watch much television growing up, and before I did Boston Legal, I had no understanding of what it was like for a viewer to look forward to finding out what was going to happen the next week. There will be an episode of The Blacklist that is just fun and another that is very intense and then another that is rather ruthless and brutal,” he added at the time. “I still love the element of surprise, even for myself.”

Finally, Spader addressed the notion that he often plays “provocateur” characters which fans “tend to assume” is part of his real-life personality.

“My career had been split pretty evenly between good guys and bad guys until I finally grew into myself enough to play a decent antihero, where you can combine the two,” he explained. “The protagonists that I’ve played tend to be people who make trouble. Or even if they don’t make it, they certainly disrupt things. It’s fun to do that in life as well. But I don’t think I ever played myself.”

The Blacklist will return in January, airing Fridays at 9 p.m. ET beginning on Jan. 4.