Person of Interest @ Wikipedia
Person of Interest @ IMDb

After 9/11 Harold Finch (Michael Emerson, LOST) built a machine that scanned every internet communication, every phone call, every surveillance camera recording for possible threats to the United States. It divides the results into two categories: major casualties and minor casualties. The government was only interested in the list with the major casualties.

The machine cannot foresee accidents or spontaneous acts of violence but it does see planned crimes.

Harold has made it his mission to help those people the government deems of no interest to them. But he has to work in secret, no one can know the machine is giving him information. So the information has to be sparse – only a social security number. And that is not always the victim’s number.

He needs help. Someone who can handle the “hand-to-hand” business. And for this he recruits a former special forces soldier the government thinks is dead (Jim Caviezel, Outlander). They also have the help of two detectives, one straight, one crooked. Together they try to protect people who don’t even know that they’re in danger.

Last year I ignored this show because quite frankly I had too much on plate already and the concept didn’t sound that interesting. But this year the number of new shows that interest me at all was quite lacking, so I gave it a chance. And what can I say. I watched the entire first season in a weekend and am now up2date with the current episodes.

While it is technically a crime show, it’s not one of the standard pattern “murder, wrong suspect, another wrong suspect, confession” shows because neither characters nor viewer know if the new client is a victim or a perpetrator. And that way they can tell a whole lot of completely different stories. And as much as I dislike LOST in retrospect, Emerson was great there and he’s great here. But so is the rest of the cast.

Now I’m just wondering who’d win a hand-to-hand combat: PoI‘s Reese or Leverage‘s Eliot? 😉