Person of Interest Binge Watch
I’ve always meant to do posts on Person of Interest because it’s not just good TV, it’s groundbreaking TV both in terms of content and in terms of storytelling. It has one of the best communities ever put on film. It’s interesting and exciting and funny and heartbreaking. The showrunners and writers reinvent the show every year, upping the stakes to the point where this coming season, the fifth, nothing less than the fate of the world is at stake, so it’s a great lesson in how to escalate over the long run. And although I’ve seen some of the episodes a dozen times, I see something new every time. Then this week, the show announced its final season, thirteen episodes burned off in six weeks starting May 3, and I realized that if we were going to do this before the last season aired. I’d have to start now.
The good news is, all four seasons are on Netflix. The bad news is, there are ninety episodes to get through before May 3 and that’s less that seven weeks. Just like the Leverage posts we did, I’m choosing specific episodes that will allow me to analyze the series as a novel with the last act yet to come. So . . .
PERSON OF INTEREST TENTATIVE BLOG POST SCHEDULE
March 21: 1-1 Pilot: Premise as Frame for Story (Jonathan Nolan)
March 22: 1-6 The Fix: The Useful Recurring Character (Nic Van Zeebroeck & Michael Sopczynski
March 28: 1-7 Witness: Reversals (Amanda Segel)
March 29: 1-19 Flesh and Blood: The Well-Rounded Antagonist (Amanda Segel)
April 1: 1-23 Firewall (Greg Plageman & Jonathan Nolan)/2-1 The Contingency (Denise The & Jonathan Nolan)/2-2 Bad Code (Greg Plageman & Patrick Harbinson) : Climax as Turning Point (Things Get Worse)
April 4: 2-16 Relevance (Amanda Segel & Jonathan Nolan): Handling a Complex Character
April 5: 2-21 Zero Day (Jeffrey Hunt)/2-22 God Mode (Richard J. Lewis): Handling Complex Story
April 11: 3-3 Lady Killer (Amanda Segel): Utilizing a Large Recurring Cast
April 12: 3-5 Razgovor (Kenneth Fink): Character Arc through Relationships
April 13: 3-6 Mors Praematura (Helen Shaver): Fusing Multiple Story Lines
April 18: 3-10 The Devil’s Share (Amanda Segel & Jonathan Nolan): Rip-Your-Heart-Out Storytelling
April 19: 3-13 4C Melissa Scrivner Love & Greg Plageman): Character in Crucible (
April 25: 3-16 RAM ((Nic Van Zeebroeck & Michael Sopczynski): Writing Great Back Story
April 26: 3-23 Deus Ex Machina (Greg Plageman & David Slack): Climax as Turning Point (The Point of No Return)
May 2: 4-1 Panopticon (Erik Mountain and Greg Plageman): Rebooting a Story After a Turning Point
May 3: 4-3 Wingman (Amanda Segel): Multi-Thread Plotting
May 4: 4- 11 If/Then/Else (Denise The): Point of View as Meaning
May 9: 4-20 Terra Incognita: Story Out of Time (Erik Mountain/Melissa Scrivner Love/Multiple Timelines
May 10: 4-21 Asylum (Andy Callahan & Denise The): Paying Off Long Running Subplots
May 11: 4-22 YHWH (Dan Dietz and Greg Plageman): Climax as Turning Point (The Crisis/Going to Hell)
The week of May 16 through the week of June 20: Season Five
Clearly that’s insane, but it gives me what I want, eight weeks to study the series as a whole from a writer’s point of view before the show delivers its thirteen episode last act in May and June.
What that doesn’t do is give anybody who’s not already started on the series a chance to actually see all the episodes. And this series is so carefully constructed, that you really do miss something important if you miss most of these episodes, not to mention you miss some really fun stuff like Reese and Zoe pretending to be married in the suburbs, which while a cliche, is so much fun with those two characters it’s all new again. Plus it’s still three episodes a week, which is a lot of TV to watch all on its own. So that’s a lot to ask of people who want to follow along.
On the other hand, it’s my blog and I really want to study this show. So I’m gonna do it.
If you’re not sure if the show is for you, here’s an intro:
Harold Finch is a computer genius who has written a diagonistic program called The Machine for the US government that watches everybody and pinpoints those who are about to commit acts of violence. Because Harold is fully aware of how dangerous to civil liberties The Machine might be, he has programmed it to only give out social security numbers that pinpoint those who might be involved in acts of violence; the Machine does not distinguish between victim and perpetrator, it just says, “Watch this person, he or she is of interest.” The government is only interested in acts of terrorism, but the machine also pinpoints regular crimes about to happen. Because nobody acts on that information, murders are committed every day that could be prevented. Finch begins to work to save the people in New York whose numbers come up, beginning by hiring a burned-out CIA agent named John Reese to act as his muscle. Over four seasons, a crooked cop (Fusco), a brilliant, principled cop (Carter), a demented programmer(Root), a German Shepherd (Bear), and a sociopathic CIA hitwoman (Shaw) join the team, forming one of the best communities in fiction. The team also draws on a smart NYC fixer (Zoe), a hapless, crooked, but very smart accountant (Leon), and a Machiavellian mob boss (Elias). It does not hurt that these people are played by Michael Emerson, Jim Calviezel, Kevin Chapman, Taraji P. Henson, Amy Acker, Sarah Shahi, Paige Turco, Ken Leung, and Enrico Colantoni.
The first season appears at the start to be a crime-of-the-week show, but once you watch the entire series and then go back to the beginning (which I’m warning you now, you will), you can see how carefully the entire series plot is layered in, and how brilliantly the community of damaged people who will come to fight the good fight together is assembled. This is a huge story that’s developed over four years of intricately plotted episodes, almost all of them excellent on their own and some groundbreaking in their approach. It’s not a comedy although there are laugh-out-loud moments, it’s not a caper although the best episodes are the team working together for the Machine like a finely tuned machine themselves, it’s character drama that increasingly becomes science fiction as the Machine reveals itself to be a full-fledged AI, heartbreakingly human-like in the last moments of the fourth season finale. It’s the smartest character-driven drama on TV. And while I hate that it’s ending, it’s ending with a thirteen-episode last act this May and June that I can’t wait to see because the people doing this show are brilliant, and I’m confident they’re going to nail the landing.
Here’s the promo for the first season of the show. Watching it now, I keep thinking, “I had no idea what this simple premise would become . . .”
Edited to Add:
Nicole asked a good question, and as part of the answer, I posted this, which probably should have been in this post from the beginning:
. . . for a shortened catch-up spree, here’s IGN’s suggestions for key episodes:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/2...
And io9’s:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5958702/how-to...
And here’s Indiewire’s seven reasons to binge watch Person of Interest:
http://www.indiewire.com/article/7-re...
Including the not-surprising-to-anybody-who’s-watched-the-show fact that more half of the episodes have been rated 9.0 or above on IMDB and the lowest rated show is 8.2.
And it has an 87% critics rating for the series on Rotten Tomatoes and 93% viewer rating.
You should watch Person of Interest.
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