CBS took a chance in 2011 on a drama about a machine that watches everyone. Person of Interest ran five seasons and 103 episodes, from September 22, 2011, to June 21, 2016. It was created by Jonathan Nolan. It is remembered, correctly, as one of the best science fiction shows ever put on broadcast television. It is also, for long stretches, a much more ordinary crime show than that reputation admits. The published critical score sits at 6.6 out of 10. That number is about right.
Trailer, via Lady Gisborne 15.
Harold Finch and the Machine
The premise is a surveillance state with a conscience, or half of one. Harold Finch, played by Michael Emerson, is a reclusive billionaire programmer. He built a system for the federal government after the September 11 attacks. The Machine sorts through electronic communications and surveillance video to predict terrorist acts and name the people planning them.
But the Machine sees more than terrorism. It sees everyday murders, and the government calls those threats “irrelevant.” Finch cannot let them go. So he hires John Reese, a former Special Forces soldier and CIA operative, to work the irrelevant cases in New York City.
Reese is played by Jim Caviezel. He arrives burnt out, presumed dead, living as a vagrant. Finch gives him a purpose and a social security number at a time. That is the engine of the show, and it is a good one.
The Numbers Game
Each week the Machine hands over a number. Finch and Reese do not know whether the person of interest is a victim or a perpetrator. They have to find out before the crime happens. The format is a procedural with a twist, and the twist is the whole point.
The show raises real moral questions. Privacy. The greater good. Justifiable homicide. What it means to act on limited information. Those questions do not stay abstract for long. They become the plot.
The early seasons lean hard on the case-of-the-week structure. Some numbers land. Some do not. The show is at its weakest when it forgets the Machine is the story and settles for catching a criminal.
Lionel Fusco and Joss Carter
The supporting cast is where Person of Interest builds its world. Kevin Chapman plays Detective Lionel Fusco, a formerly corrupt officer. Reese coerces him into helping, and Fusco spends years earning back something like a conscience.
Detective Joss Carter is the better character. She is an ex-US Army lieutenant and a former senior military interrogator in the 4th Infantry Division. She starts out investigating Reese for his vigilante work. She ends up inside the operation.
Carter’s arc carries real weight. When the criminal organization HR has her boyfriend, Detective Cal Beecher, murdered, she vows vengeance. That vow drives the back half of the show’s early run and gives it stakes the numbers alone never could.
Sameen Shaw and Root
Amy Acker plays Root, and Sarah Shahi plays Sameen Shaw. Both arrive after the show has found its footing, and both change it. Shaw is an ex-United States Marine and a US Army ISA assassin, on the run after her employers betray her.
Root is the more interesting problem. She is a true believer in the Machine, and her faith pushes the show toward the questions it actually wants to ask. The Machine itself develops sentience. It covertly arranges to be moved to an undisclosed location to protect itself from interference.
By the third season the sentience is fully out in the open. The Machine communicates. It assists. It has opinions. The crime show becomes a science fiction show, and it is better for it.
Decima Technologies and John Greer
The second season introduces the villain that makes the back half work. Decima Technologies is a secretive private intelligence firm. Its leader is John Greer, an ex-British Army officer turned MI6 spy. Greer wants access to the Machine.
That rivalry gives the show a spine. It is no longer a man and a billionaire solving puzzles. It is a fight over who gets to own the thing that sees everything. The moral questions from season one come back with guns.
The show’s best stretch is here, when the case-of-the-week machinery drops away and the war for the Machine takes over. The weakest stretch is the one before it, when the show is still pretending to be a cop drama with a gadget.
What the Show Got Right
The performances hold it together. Emerson is the anchor. He plays Finch as a man who knows exactly what he built and cannot quite live with it. Caviezel is a stiffer presence, but the role calls for a man running on empty, and he delivers that.
Nolan’s writing team is smart about escalation. The Machine starts as a plot device and becomes a character. The show earns that shift because it takes the rules seriously. If the Machine can see everything, then everyone who wants it is dangerous.
The show was acclaimed during its run. Katharine Trendacosta of Gizmodo wrote that by the end in 2016, Person of Interest had turned from a “crime-fighting show” with an entertaining plot device into “one of the best science-fiction series ever broadcast.” That is a fair description of where it landed.
It also won the 2012 People’s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Drama. That is a popularity prize, not a craft prize, but it tells you the show connected with an audience beyond genre fans.
Where It Stumbles
The 6.6 is not a knock on the ambition. It is a knock on the execution, and on the ratio. Five seasons and 103 episodes is a lot of television, and a lot of it is filler. The number-of-the-week episodes blur together.
The show also takes too long to trust its own best idea. The Machine’s sentience, the Decima war, Greer, Root — all of it is stronger than the standalone cases. The series spends a season and a half acting like it does not know that.
And the ending is compressed. A show this interested in consequences does not always get the room to sit in them. The final run moves fast, and some of the weight it built gets spent rather than resolved.
Ranking What Actually Matters
Strip the show down and the order of its parts is not close.
- The Machine as a character — the one idea the whole series is built to serve.
- John Greer and Decima Technologies — the force that gives the show a destination.
- Michael Emerson and Amy Acker — the performers who sell the ideas.
- The case-of-the-week structure — the thing the show had to outgrow and mostly did.
- The standalone procedural beats — the noise around the signal.
That ranking is the review. Everything above it is evidence for it.
The Score
Person of Interest is a show with a great premise, a great villain, and a great final idea, wrapped around a procedural that was never as good as the parts around it. When it commits to the Machine, it is genuinely one of the best science fiction series broadcast television has produced. When it does not, it is a CBS crime drama with a gimmick.
What makes the 6.6 worth arguing about is not the filler. It is that the show proved the idea was never the problem. Broadcast television could carry a story about machine sentience and state surveillance, and an audience would follow it there. The failure was pacing, not nerve. That is a better legacy than the score suggests.
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