The Black List definitely has a rough start. The pilot is, frankly, weird, with very little idea who these characters are and almost no thought given to why we should care. Our lead female agent is completely forgettable and doesn't seem to have any real idea what's going on. The rest of the FBI team are caricatures and lazy tropes. And even Red – our mysterious mastermind – comes across as less enticing and more hackney. But there's still something inherently interesting about the premise: one of the FBI's "Most Wanted" willingly turns himself in and claims to be able to deliver criminals that are so far outside of the FBI's league that they aren't even aware that they exist. This is the so-called "black list", a joke on the fact that Red is supposedly a "red list" criminal (i.e. Most Wanted and on all international watch lists), and yet considers himself small fry compared to the rest.

Of course, there's an issue here: for the show to work we have to simultaneously believe that the Black List – and evidence of a criminal social strata so good at their jobs as to be invisible to law enforcement – is very real, but also that Red is somehow simultaneously a bigger fish (someone who appears to be playing both sides) and yet also worse than them all, as the FBI have been hunting him for years. You just have to ignore that. Like a lot of what the pilot sets up, to be honest. The whole baby/adoption plot line? Ignore it. The fact that our lead is a profiler? It'll basically never come up again.

Still, that core premise around a wanted criminal basically going into business with a Black Site (yes, a likely secondary pun) FBI squad means we get interesting, supervillain-esque plots, alongside questions of morality versus legality. Nothing that hasn't been done before, but it's still fun.

Really, the show's saving graces are twofold:

• Once the central idea is set up and running, the dual-mysteries around why Red is so interested in this one otherwise unexceptional FBI agent and what exactly has brought him out of the shadows now, along with the subsequent subplots around Tom, her husband; Sam, her father; and the various double-twists and confusions that ensue, all add up to some pretty interesting and engaging storytelling (even if the characters themselves never get a huge amount of work, Tom aside);
• And the villains of the week are actually often pretty interesting. The early episodes feature kidnappers and extortion rackets, nothing too unusual. But some of the later plots are novel and intriguing (e.g. a facilitator who "disappears" people by cosmetically altering victims and having them killed in tragic accidents, so that the wrong people are assumed dead; or a vigilante "judge" who punishes cops, lawyers, and others who falsely imprisoned people by doing the same to them).

The result is a show which consistently improves itself. It's (thankfully) answered quite a few of the questions posed earlier, whilst keeping enough cards hidden to keep you pleasantly confused as to what's actually going on, and the foundations that have now been set around the mysterious Berlin, Red's full involvement in Elizabeth's past, and, of course, who ranks higher than our current antagonists on the Black List, well, those all mean we'll definitely be returning for season two.

We'd been a bit concerned that The Black List would just try to keep dragging out the mystery that it started with – a criticism that is often levelled at The Mentalist (though I'd say unfairly) – and continue serving curveballs around Keen's parentage, Red's relationship to her, and Tom's loyalty. Thankfully, season two has decided to just scream ahead on all fronts, and leaves us with a very different show to the one that we started with. They're just about continuing the "monster of the week" format, but it gets forgotten more often than remembered, and with the task force now in disarray, Keen on the run, and Tom exonerated, it's not so much a new game, as an entirely new board and set of pieces.

I'm also glad that the Cabal have been refocused as the main villain. They were set up nicely in the first season, and I thought the escalation here has worked well. They work well as a foil to Red, and they also give him a redeemable purpose. Whilst we're yet to fully understand what made him go AWOL and become a career criminal, the pieces are beginning to slot into place that the Cabal may well be the primary cause. Whether he discovered them as a Special Investigator and realised that they could only be brought down from outside the system, or was forced out to save his own skin, is still unclear, but it's a nice evolution. Ditto the constant revelations around Keen's parents, how Tom came into her life, and where Red fits into it all.

But above all else, season two gave us much more of a look into the rest of the cast. I'm still not too sure how the Mossad operative truly fits into things, and I'm beginning to wonder if the original female operative's death was more of a recasting choice than anything else, but I like the mystery so far. I've also enjoyed seeing the descent of the station Chief, as a simple favour turns into a spiral of blackmails, turns into a genuinely unexpected twist. I'm less sure of Keen's own descent; her slow collapse to the dark side, buckling under the strain of never knowing who to trust. It's not unbelievable, and I think the actress is really finding a solid place for the character, but I'm not sure it's fully fleshed out or thought through just yet. We'll see.

At any rate, we finished the season with a vague thought of moving onto something else for a while, but found ourselves immediately drawn back in, so it does feel like it's steadily improving.