Person of Interest begins, surprisingly, as a standard police procedural in the grand tradition of television police procedurals. If you’ve ever watched a cop show on America television, or one which deals with the legal system (hello Law & Order and one of your millions of subbrands!), then you might have an inkling of what the first season of Person of Interest contains (though that grammatical problem is bound to stick unless we count the show’s title as a verb). At the very least, the show provides the perfect inviting atmosphere for a prime time audience who may not want to reckon with the idea of constant government surveillance, its uses and abuses. For a show that began in 2011, 3 years into Obama’s presidency, Person of Interest seems more concerned with the legal travails of George W. Bush’s Patriot and NSA movement than anything directly to do with the modern day, which is surprising.
Anyway, the premise! Jesus Neeson…I mean, Jim Caviezel plays a ex-something (probably CIA) everyone thought was dead. Michael Emerson, who always plays the most charmingly weird characters on televisions, plays an eccentric, also presumed dead, billionaire. Said billionaire created a machine via government contract that uses the weight of accumulated information on the Internet and elsewhere to discover potential threats to the nation. However, for whatever reason, Harold Finch (a pseudonym, I’d guess) leaves the government, but allows himself a backdoor to find the “irrelevant” cases – the ones which don’t necessarily impact national security, but certainly cause personal cataclysm. As such, the “machine” pumps out a Social Security number, and our vigilantes use their wit and intelligence to find this person before they kill someone or are killed in turn.
Thing is, a lot of people consider the very idea of the show completely unreasonable…but those sorts of people don’t know much about the actual technical details regarding such a process. What “The Machine” does is actually not far off from the field of machine learning. To copy directly from Wikipedia, Machine learning is a subfield of computer science that evolved from the study of pattern recognition and computational learning theory in artificial intelligence. Machine learning explores the study and construction of algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. Such algorithms operate by building a model from example inputs in order to make data-driven predictions or decisions, rather than following strictly static program instructions.
If you watch the show even in the first season, you will notice that this is exactly how the machine processes its data. They teach the machine via its programming to learn how to detect X or Y, and it eventually learns the approprite measures to find that information. That said, usually machine learning does contain a measure of failures, but it’s possible to construct a machine with a very high success rate. I’m curious if the show will treat the machine itself as a MacGuffin of Magical Knowledge, or whether it will take artificial intelligence, at least the realistic kind, seriously. So far, the show’s been consistent in its realistic use of technology and actually using real programming terminology, so I would bet that the showrunners are smart enough to work out the implications of such a system.
This is, admittedly, rather high concept. Most people would consider this science fiction, and yet the show itself takes the form of a very conventional vehicle for entertainment. At a point, you do need to wonder whether all this set-up seems necessary for police work, and it certainly works as a differentiating factor. Unlike most shows in this vein, Person of Interest plays all of its moves straight, with the occasional line of dry humor here and there. I guess we might call it “deathly serious”, and that’s true of the first few episodes. The New York which it portrays appears cold, distant, and mired in constant earth tones; there is only the drive to find the people behind the numbers, to save them or to stop them. Strangely enough, this divergence from police procedural form also engages the audience in the case-by-case proceedings, since there’s a constant air of mystery as to what, exactly, is happening. The people behind each Social Security number vary enough that each episode keeps you on your toes, guessing at every angle and always on the precipice of a real twist. I like that sort of thing!
That said, a show that wants to be smart must also have its fair share of dumb, and I guess Jim Caviezel fits the bill. I’m not sure what they were thinking, but the director seems to tell Caviezel that he’s Liam Neeson from Taken, or Batman. We’ve got that combination of invincible black ops agent and low, intimidating whisper that may/may not make you cringe. Also, I can’t help but remember The Passion of the Christ every time he comes onto the screen (hence, Jesus Neeson). Given that strange little mishap, the action scenes often play as bursts of excitement and the culmination of procedural evidence, rather than as a “all action, all the time” mentality. As such, their use is brief and effective, so much so that the later parts of Season 1 begin cutting away from the fighting/shooting or terminating them early. I imagine that’s a conscious decision as the plotline gets more complicated.
Still, all of this is an initial impression of a show that’s already run through 4 seasons. I hear it gets much more serialized and interesting from here, which would make Season 1 a bit of a gateway drug for people not used to that brand of story-telling. Either way, Person of Interest entertains me greatly, and I look forward to watching more of it. I just hope it doesn’t go all LOST on me.
