Blindspot: Series Ending Mapped Out in Case of Cancellation

It’s been a pretty bleak fall season for network television. Four new TV shows have seen their initial episode orders cut (Minority Report, Blood & Oil, The Player, and Truth be Told) and it’s understood that they’ve all been essentially cancelled. One of the season’s few bright spots, ratings-wise, has been NBC’s Blindspot.

Airing on Monday nights, in the coveted 10pm timeslot behind The Voice, Blindspot debuted to a 3.12 rating in the 18-49 demographic with 10.61 million viewers. The numbers have come way down since then but it’s still NBC’s highest-rated scripted show. Recently the network gave the drama a full first season order.

Unless the ratings keep falling, Blindspot’s all but guaranteed to be renewed for a second season.

Though the show’s end isn’t near, series creator/showrunner Martin Gero says he knows how the series will end — and knows how he can end the series if there’s a sudden cancellation at some point.

We know exactly who she is, we know who did this to her. We know why they did it to her; we know what their end game is. That’s not stuff we could do on the fly. For us, too, the early weeks in the writers room were more about Episode 22 than they were about Episodes 2 and 3. It was really important for us to know what all the tent poles were going to be for us this season and write backwards, as opposed to try to figure it out as we went along — which, to be honest, I just don’t know how to do. So, yeah, it’s pretty solidly set. And it’s why were able to give away what seems to be like so much — because we know what’s coming and we know there’s so much more to come.

We know what a lot of the tattoos are. The real bummer of this show is if it didn’t get picked up to series, we had done so much work before on the pilot because a) we needed to know a lot of these answers just in the pitching of it and b) we’re imprinting a treasure map on the body that even a casual viewer will start to detect if there’s a new tattoo on her back. So a lot of story had to be imprinted on her body beforehand.

There’s a handful of tattoos in there to give us outs if we run into trouble. They’re on the generic side. But it’s a lot of fun trying to stick to some sort of game plan.

What do you think? Are you enjoying the Blindspot series? Do you think it will be renewed for a second season or is there a chance that it will be cancelled instead? Will you stick with it?