Person of Interest is a new procedural crime drama that premiered on CBS this week. Over 13 million viewers tuned in for the premiere this past Thursday making it one the night's most viewed shows. I'm sure the viewership had something to do with all the J.J. Abrams fan boys out there (me included), as well as John Nolan of Dark Night fame. Throw in Emmy award winning Michael Emerson (Ben Linus from Lost) and you got yourself the makings of a winner. I like to think of the show as a cross between Minority Report and Batman.
Person of Interest centers heavily around 9/11. Michael Emerson's character, Mr. Finch, is hired by the U.S. Government to build a machine that can collect data from all forms of electronic communication and video, find patterns in the data, and from that data identify threats to national security. The machine worked, but it also picked up "irrelevant" data. This irrelevant data includes murders that don't affect the country as a whole, but all the same they're murders that Mr. Finch decides he must do something to stop. The murders aren't crimes of passion, but premeditated planned crimes, so there is a limited window where something could be done to stop them. If you notice, Mr. Finch has a limp. I believe that Mr. Finch tried to stop one of these "irrelevant" crimes himself and was badly injured. I'm theorizing that this is the point when he realized he needed someone like John Reese (played by Jim Caviezel).
At the end of the episode the data mining machine is revealed to be a datacenter full of servers much like IBM's Watson. We don't know the location of the servers, but we assume it's some top secret government facility. This technology is grounded in reality; it's not all science fiction. There are real data mining systems used by the government for the purposes of preventing terrorist attacks and the like. Click here to read last year's Office of the Director of National Intelligence report on data mining. Even in the private sector large entities such as Google and Facebook gather data on people every day, so the concepts explored in Person of Interest aren't out of the realm of belief.
Person of Interest has lots of potential, but it could go either way. Let's hope it keeps up with the interest of people. What do you think? Is Person Of Interest a keeper?
