If you can get past the first few, somewhat wooden episodes, then Person of Interest’s five seasons of brilliance is the perfect binge for, well, almost anytime.
It’s popcorn-perfect and is part thriller, part sci-fi with bits of dry humour to break pace and tension.
In short, the show goes from plankish to fabulous in a few episodes, and then, you’re hooked.
The premise of the show is technology, and how, after 9/11, artificial intelligence and surveillance designed to prevent terror have had some very real, very human side effects on society.
Harold Finch is a reclusive billionaire who built a system known only as the Machine.
It watches everything, ingesting data from cameras, phones, and anything else that leaves a digital footprint, and then predicts acts of violence before they happen.
The government only cares about the big threats, the ones labelled as relevant, but Finch cannot ignore the smaller numbers, the everyday people who are about to be caught in something fatal.
Saving people, by the numbers
This is where John Reese, a former Special Forces soldier and CIA operative, enters the picture.
He finds Reese as a homeless, off the grid wanderer and offers him meaning again, as an agent of change to prevent Machine predicted catastrophes for regular people.
Together, they work through the stuff the machine spews out, social security numbers, trying to stop crimes with almost no context, never quite sure whether the person they are watching is about to pull the trigger or take the bullet.
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While the series starts out as a case of the week, several layers are built in as the show progresses with corrupt cops, long and short storylines and the like.
Reese becomes a person of interest to the police; the CIA starts to pursue him and in between the pair are trying to evade law enforcement as much as they are damage-controlling the lives of the people that the Machine flags.
But before you think that this is the beginning and the end of the narrative.
Stop, watch, and indulge. That’s because the show takes a sho’t left.
The Machine starts to change, too.
It takes on a live of its own over time and reveals the level of simian awareness that we all fear AI could become.
What we fear AI could become
As luck would have it, another machine also enters the picture. It’s called Samaritan. Later as the series progresses.
It becomes almost an emotional machine rival to Finch, Reese, their machine and the stories that play out.
A rivalry between machines evolves and as it unfolds, humanity is clocked in between the questions that they ask of one another and of the two humans who started it all.
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As the episodes roll by Person of Interest becomes more engrossing.
This, to the point of not wanting to go to bed despite heavy eyelids. It’s that good, and no wonder that there are several seasons to enjoy.
Also, an added pleasure, is that there are more than the standard Netflix eight to ten episodes a pop.
This is proper, brilliant, traditional network television.
Brilliant television – watch the trailer
Jim Caviezel’s plays Reese with the right kind of restraint and silent violence, so to speak.
Michael Emerson gives Finch a careful, almost fragile intensity.
The balance of the cast fits their characters like a hand in a perfect glove. There’s just nothing that’s not to like about Person of Interest.
Apart from the first few episodes of somewhat-yawn, the rapid evolution of the show and the questions it asks of its audience, like who gets to decide about what happens to people, or whether something or an instance qualifies as such, the layer cake of narratives.
Well, that’s where the viewing pleasure comes in. It’s action, humour, technology, adventure and thriller all in one, and it’s smart.
And that’s what an audience needs, and expects, from great television.
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