Person of Interest...I sit and think about this show. Generally, I'm a fan of what comes out of JJ Abrams and his Bad Robot production house. The man is clearly a first order geek and seeks to make his own impact on imaginative storytelling. The man has nothing to prove, what with Alias, and even more to the point, LOST. But he has gone on to Fringe and other shows...like Person of Interest. Now, I had to take a couple passes at this show before it truly gripped me. Yes, it deals with lots of pertinent issues of our times, like lots of good science fiction does, such as the War on Terror, the Surveillance State, artificially intelligence and the like. At first, though, it appears to be a procedural police show with some spy stuff. And if you didn't hang around long enough or pay close enough attention, that is all you would see, at least in the first two seasons.
Hearing enough voices say, "PoI, possibly the best science fiction on TV right now!", I felt obligated to try to stick it out, especially being an Abrams fan as well as trusting the pedigree of others on the show. It is subtle. You get a few hints in the first season, some more in the second, but apparently the science fiction element, the evolution of a true artificial consciousness, comes to full bloom in season three.
Robots are all over the place in science fiction, but the exploration of an AI, a self aware machine, has it's highest marks in literature. There are movies that deal with it, too, like 2001 and the Terminator films (notably 2). But on TV, the key examples seem to be Data on Star Trek The Next Generation and Ronald D. Moore's handling of the Cylons in his remake of Battlestar Galactica. Person of Interest, out of all the other ideas wants to explore, this is the big one.
I'm down.
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