It declares its hand loudly from the opening scene, though it seems to lean heavily on the tropes of the genre generally and its exemplars specifically, first among them The Silence of the Lambs. That's sharp and useful - television is an extremely derivative form, and its audience often forgive visible lineage - but how much is too much?

Spader plays Raymond Reddington, nicknamed Red, one of the world's most wanted men who, inexplicably, surrenders. Once in custody, he says he will deal only through a young FBI profiler Elizabeth Keen (Megan Boone). Sound familiar? Just about the only thing Reddington doesn't do in his first meeting with Keen is ask her whether the lambs have stopped screaming.

''There's nothing special about me,'' she says to him in their first encounter. ''Oh,'' he replies, ''I think you're very special.'' From there we're pushed onto a textbook plot - the abduction of the daughter of a senior military official - but there are enough moments when The Blacklist pushes against the predictable to command your attention.

There's a bunch of high-pressure dramas coming this year, a sort of post-24 reaction, perhaps, but one made all the more complex when you consider 24 is also returning, though it has cleverly shed half its weight and plans to do in 12 hours what it once did in twice that time.

So, The Blacklist needs to make noise against a bunch of rivals, notably Crisis (about the abduction of the president's son, and starring Rachael Taylor and Gillian Anderson) and Hostages (about the abduction of the US president's doctor, starring Toni Collette and Dylan McDermott).

Spader (pictured) is brilliant, but that's almost a given. In a pre-Sopranos and Ray Donovan world, he delivered one of the best characters in network drama in Alan Shore. The challenge here is the familiarity of the premise, not just cast against a bunch of shows that came before it, but up against other shows competing for oxygen in the same season.

The Blacklist airs on Seven later this year.