Interest Levels

With a big NCIS shaped hole in my weekly schedule until the New Year, I need a new kick. With that in mind, I gave Person of Interest a try after watching England actually play quite well against Italy. I put that down to having a couple of United players running the midfield.

Person of Interest appears to have got a lot of buzz on the back of having Jonathan Nolan involved in the creative process. With The Dark Knight Rises - which he co-wrote - making huge piles of money, his star is on the up and a show with his name on it was at least going to merit some interest from me. But from the pilot episode, which was enjoyable enough, he seems to have resorted to some big book of cliché plays.

Take our hero, one John Reese. He's ex-CIA, doing some rather naughty stuff that now racks him with guilt. Chuck on that being unable to save the woman he loved. He's a badass loner who wants to be left alone to drink himself to death. That's he's played by Jim Caviezel doesn't exactly endear him to me, given his part in the absolute abomination that was the remake of The Prisoner.

In any case, our man is just some bum on the streets until some local gangster hoodlums on the tube try to steal his whiskey. This results in a one-on-five smackdown and a visit to the local cop shop, where a quick fingerprint search reveals some of his somewhat unsavoury past. Luckily, before he can get slapped in irons, he's got out by a brief hired by a certain Mr Finch.

Finch is cliché fest number two. He's a computer genius, therefore a tad geeky. He's also a bit crippled and a billionaire looking, like Reese, to atone for past mistakes.

So, two characters with nothing too new to bring us. However... the angle is that Finch designed a computer in the wake of 9/11 that would monitor all communication systems and all CCTV to find potential terrorists to prevent the same happening again. Amongst the information considered irrelevant to this is the potential to prevent murders and other nasty crimes. Finch feels guilty about ignoring this all the while and ropes in Reese to be his partner: a backdoor Finch uses to get into his system presents them with a Social Security number of a "Person of Interest". From there, they have to work out their involvement in whatever crime is being planned and stop it. It's not wholly original, but it's a nice enough angle.

While it's not gripped me as much as NCIS - for one thing, Reese may be a badass, but he's still nowhere near the level of Leroy Jethro Gibbs - I'm willing to give it a few episodes to impress me. That it's been given a second season in the States would suggest someone likes it, but I can't help but feel I wish they'd given Human Target another chance instead.