A Show of Interest?

Person of Interest, CBS, Thursdays 9/8c
It’s that time of year when the networks are premiering new shows right and left, and critics and viewers alike are trying to figure out what’s great and what’s terrible (For the latter, I’d nominate The Playboy Club). Among the all shows I’m just now hearing about, one I had been anticipating for months, Person of Interest, premiered last Thursday.
I had high hopes for Person of Interest, s a just-outside-of-possibility science fiction crime drama with one of the best pedigrees of all the new shows premiering this fall. J.J. Abrams (Lost and Star Trek) and Jonathan Nolan (co-writer of The Dark Knight and Christopher’s brother) are the co-creators, and one of the show’s two leads is Michael Emerson, who won a well-deserved Emmy for his role as Benjamin Linus on Lost (where he gave the most menacing delivery of a quotation from Of Mice and Men ever to delight the small screen). The only way I can think of improving on that group of three would be to include Joss Whedon, creator of Firefly.
But I also anticipated the show’s premiere with trepidation. For all the talents of the guys in the previous paragraph, there were other signs that boded less well. The other of the show’s two main leads is Jim Caviezel (Jesus in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ), whose acting raises some concerns. And then the trailer had issues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68xN_BNYhc4
It’s not all bad. There’s some fun action, and Emerson menaces as Emerson does. But Caviezel is rather lump-ish, and I’m not describing his decidedly un-lumpy action-hero physique. Rather, he resembles a Madame Tussaud’s mannequin of himself, since his eyes don’t quite seem to hold the spark that distinguishes the quick from the dead. And then Emerson, as himself, calls it “an exciting and stylish crime prevention show.” Crime prevention show? Oh dear. It’s like, Minority Report, but more boring.
The pilot was neither as bad as I feared it might have been, nor as awesome as I hoped it could have been. It was fine. I’ll be going back, because I think it could turn awesome within an episode or two, but the premiere is best described with that damning-with-faint-praise word. Fine.
The show opens on a very-bearded, forty-ish hobo (Caviezel) sleeping with a bottle of whisky on the New York subway. He gets in an altercation with some young white guys whose actors have to straddle a strange and ineffectively-written divide between prep and punk. Circumstances ensue, we discoverthat the hobo is really good at giving beatdowns, and then a mysterious billionaire named Finch (Emerson) is offering the hobo a job. After Reese accepts, there is a lot of explaining of the show’s premise, usually while the two of them walk under some shadowy bridge outside, wearing gray trenchcoats against the flat gray clouds of early spring in Manhattan.
After 9-11, the government was looking for a way to keep America safe. Finch designed a machine that could prevent terrorist attacks by using the data gathered from the cameras and microphones across the city (The show does not specify whether the machine works just in New York, as seems to be the implication, or nationwide). Beyond just preventing terrorist attacks, however, Finch’s machine could also predict certain premeditated crimes, which the government thought was irrelevant. Finch disagreed, and programmed the machine to tell him, once a day, the Social Security Number of one “person of interest” about to be involved in a predicted crime. Apparently taking any more information, including whether the SSN belongs to a witness, victim, or perpetrator, would lead the government to catch on and block his access entirely. Since Finch is a slightly pudgy, limping type who wouldn’t look out of place as a middle-management peer of Michael Scott’s, he needs Reese to do much of the physical work of stopping these crimes. Reese, of course, takes the job, and the pilot ends with them solving the show’s first crime.
One of my favorite things about the show is the dialogue, which almost all of the actors deliver well. When Reese asks Finch where the machine is, physically, Finch responds that in one sense he does not know, probably some government warehouse somewhere. (This would have been a perfect place for an Arc of the Covenant Indiana Jones joke, but the show misses the opportunity.) However, in another sense, Finch says, “the machine is everywhere. Watching us with ten thousand eyes. Listening with a million ears.” Neither Emerson’s inflection nor the dialogue itself quite reflects how real people really say things, which is effective within the context of the show. The script is a little stylized, perhaps a little dramatic, but in the service of both wry humor and, occasionally, a bit of lyricism. I like my action heroes to quip a little, like when Reese interrupts an arms deal to get himself some guns, criticizes an opponent’s ineptitude with weapons, and walks out saying, “I’ll hold onto these while you guys get some more practice. Have a nice day.” And I like my mysterious billionaires to respond to questions like “what is this place?” about an abandoned library base to which Finch brings Reese, with “the decline of western civilization. The city closed half of its libraries. Budget cuts.”
The crime in this episode wasn’t the most exciting, but this was the pilot. A lot of time was devoted to setting up the premise, which came at the expense of developing the details and stakes of the crime. I am optimistic that the crimes to follow will be more exciting once the episodes can spend more time on each of them. And Caviezel’s acting, one of my main concerns, turned out not to be nearly as bad as I had feared from the few clips of him speaking in the preview. Reese isn’t the most expressive character, but he does deliver some of his lines quite well. The character did only just emerge from a depression, presumably at the mysterious death of a girlfriend, that left him living on the streets. Maybe he’ll emote more as he thaws a bit.
I will be coming back to this show to see if the mystery of the week becomes more exciting, which I think is a good chance. The show did also pose two mysteries clearly destined for longer story arcs. Those mysteries are: what happened to Reese’s girlfriend? And what’s up with Finch, especially after Finch mentions both that Reese isn’t the only one who’s lost somebody and that the world believes that he, Finch, is dead? Those mysteries aren’t groundbreakingly original in their currently vague premises, and I hope that they become more interesting as more is revealed. Also, especially with J.J. Abrams on board, I’m pleased that the overarching mysteries to solve are a little more humble and, hopefully, manageable than they were in Lost.
This is not a perfect show, but if I were you, and looking for a new crime show this fall, this would not be a bad choice.