Person of Interest

Channel: Nine
Day & time: Tuesday, 9.30 p.m.*
*As at January 2012

Television, as with any narrative art form, requires a certain suspension of disbelief. It's one thing to get an audience to accept that four trendy New Yorkers could get along as well as they did in Friends; but it's quite another to get them to accept that time travellers from the future would go back to prehistoric times as in Terra Nova.

The granddaddy of all out-there shows - at least in recent times - was Lost, which both fascinated and befuddled viewers over its 6-season run. It should have been a clue when Michael Emerson, who played Linus in Lost, appeared in the pilot episode of Person of Interest. Closer inspection also reveals the name J.J. Abrams in the producers' credits. And if you thought Lost was out-there, this show is positively loopy.

In fact, it's so loopy, I'm not sure that I've even got the premise quite right (no doubt someone will let me know if I haven't). Anyway, it seems that Mr Finch (Emerson) is some kind of shadowy, super-rich tech wizard (or maybe industrialist) who has managed to convince the authorities that he's dead. Mr Finch worked with "the government" on developing an all-seeing surveillance system to prevent another 9/11 terror attack. This system is unimaginatively known as "the Machine".

Unknown to Finch at the time, the Machine saw lots and lots of crimes happening all over the place and spat out a bunch of suspects, identified by their social security numbers. However, the government wasn't interested in all these violent offenders, only in potential terrorists. So the Machine daily produces two lists - one of "relevant" suspects (i.e. terrorists) and one "irrelevant" (ordinary crims). It seems that the "relevant" list still goes to the government every day, but Finch - donning his best super-hero guise - has decided to access the "irrelevant" list to prevent the innocent from being harmed by these miscreants.

Trouble is, Mr Finch is a nerdish weakling, so slipping on a pair of tights and a cape isn't an option. Enter former CIA secret ops man John Reese (Jim Caviezel). John has been doing it tough, having dropped "off the grid" when his girlfriend was killed. As luck would have it, the government also thinks he's dead. Bingo! Reese becomes the perfect tough guy to carry out Finch's plan to protect the world (or at least New York City) from bad guys.

So basically each week the Machine throws up the social security number of a "person of interest". Finch and Reese then have to work out the connection of this person to the potential (or in some cases, actual) crime.

I must admit that, as an idea, the premise behind Person of Interest has some potential. Let's face it, it's no more preposterous than say The X-Files, Twin Peaks or Supernatural. The problem with the show however is the perfunctory way all of this is explained. All we're given to allow us to suspend our disbelief (and it's a pretty huge disbelief at that) is Finch's say-so, coupled with a couple of shots of some high-tech equipment and a board with lots of twine on it.

We're just meant to accept that because Finch is "super-rich", he's capable of effectively playing God. Money opens a lot of doors, but I'm not sure it can allow the kind of chicanery that Finch gets up to. Where does he keep all this money anyway? Even Swiss banks require some sort of ID, and (I assume) proof that you're actually alive.

And didn't it occur to anyone that while Finch and Reese brazenly walk the streets of NYC, "the Machine" will pick them up and presumably feed that information to "the government"? After all, two supposedly dead guys wandering the streets of a major city sounds like a potential terror threat to me.

There's also something oddly disturbing about the notion of two supposed do-gooders using highly secret and totally intrusive surveillance equipment to prevent crime. It's almost an advertisement for Big Brother-style (that's Orwell, not the reality show) snooping into the lives of private citizens. Welcome to Totalitarianism 101; but it's OK, you see, because they only use their powers for good, not evil.

Finch is like an online Dexter, seeking out bad guys before they can kill again. But unlike Dexter, he sends Reese to do his dirty work for him. After all, the rich couldn't possibly get their hands dirty by being violent, even if it is towards those who are themselves violent.

Also oddly, amongst all this sneakiness and crime-fighting, the good officers of the NYPD don't seem to have too much of a problem with Finch and Reese's vigilantism. Indeed, they enlist - or perhaps extort - one detective, Det. Fusco (Kevin Chapman) to be their "eyes and ears" inside the force.  

All that said, the cast put on a brave front as they navigate their way through the muddled script. Jim Caviezel does his best tough-guy act as Reese, even if (at least on the evidence of the early episodes) he struggles to find the softer side of the character. Kevin Chapman and Taraji P. Henson play it straight down the line as cops caught up in Finch's web. But the real attraction here is Michael Emerson. There's a dark, almost mischievous quality he brings to Finch that's almost mesmeric. I suspect if we gave him a hairless cat, he could easily pass for a super-villian, which may be part of the point the show is trying to make (i.e. that the line between good and evil is a fine one indeed).

In the end though, Person of Interest just becomes a bit too much to swallow. It's one of those shows where you find yourself saying "yeah, right!" at least a couple of times per episode. If this show is to survive (and there are already some rumblings at its US parent, CBS) then the writing needs to improve considerably. The believability factor needs to be ramped up, and the writers need to give us more reasons to care about the characters. Without that, there's only so much baloney anyone can stomach.

David Edwards