- 87,440
- Rule 12
- GTP_Famine
It's difficult to describe the show without giving too much away, but a potted summary would be:
Harold "Finch" (played by Michael Emerson, formerly the villain of Lost), an IT genius, engineer and reclusive billionaire, has created a surveillance system designed to predict acts of terror for the NSA - but it also predicts acts of violence against ordinary people. The nature of the system he has constructed means that it only generates the identity of someone who ought to be watched - the eponymous Person of Interest - and it cannot be interrogated or intercepted by human eyes in order not to violate the Fourth Amendment. Whether they are victim or perpetrator isn't even known, but the system is never wrong.
Since only the acts of terror are important to the NSA, only the 'relevant' identities are passed over while, unknown to the federal agencies, "Finch" receives the 'irrelevant' identities - ordinary people who will become victims or perpetrators of an act of violence, usually involving someone's death - and tries to prevent them from coming to pass. However, he is not especially mobile due to a spinal injury, not particularly adept at stealth and abhors violence - so cannot do it on his own...
And yes, I've put quote marks around two names there, because they might not actually be their names...
It's very intelligently written - written and produced by Jonathan Nolan, brother of Chris (Interstellar, the Batman Begins trilogy, Inception, Memento, The Prestige), with a finger of JJ Abrams involved too, but not to the same level by which he ruined Star Trek - and once the character development of the first 8 episodes is done, it's witty (very dryly so) and quite tense. Indeed just when you think it can't get any more dramatic and tense, it goes up an order of magnitude.
As is the way with a Nolan involved, there's an unusual timeline, where the majority of the majority of episodes occur in conventional present-day time but there are often scene-setting 'flashbacks', often through the mechanism of the surveillance system, that present concurrently, to tell you the history of some of the individuals - usually "John", Harold and the system itself.
It's also one of very few TV series on Netflix to have a flawlessly five star rating - and there is a character who is largely unnamed (but is often referred to by a single word epithet) that I think is amongst the greatest fictional characters ever.
'She' is called "The Machine"
And if not, why not? Get onto Netflix and watch season 1.
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