Review: PERSON OF INTEREST Season 1 Episode 1 Pilot

I've really been looking forward to this show starting, since I saw the trailer a couple of months back I thought it looked an interesting premise.  Very quickly during the first episode you realise the trailer was made up of clips from the pilot, I haven't decided as yet weather that's a good thing or a bad thing.  There were a couple of things that drew me to this show, first off it's produced by none other than J.J. A brams he must surely be the busiest guy in Hollywood right now.  Second to that the shows star man is Michael Emmerson, Lost's Ben Linus.

Don't take that last little sentence to seriously, this is not Lost nor does it look in the first episode that it will turn into anything quite as big.  Michael Emmerson plays Mr Finch in the show and it looks like Abrams has come up with the same idea for him as he did with Ben Linus, let's make him mysterious enough that the audience and his fellow leading man (Jim Cavizel) don't know to much about him.

What we do know about Finch is that he's a billionaire who got tired of making lots of money through science, following that he wrote a computer program for the US government which can predict criminal activity.  The system was designed to give the government an early warning to acts of terrorism, problem was the computers algorithm was picking up every aspect of criminality meaning that Finch had to write some code for the machine to ignore trivial matters which the government do not need to know about.  That left Finch with a conscience problem, what happens to all these other people?

That's where Cavizel comes in, he plays John Reese a former CIA hitman who has been having personal problems and is currently living on the streets making attempts to drink himself to death.  The government think he's dead until some young hood's attempt to jump him on the train one evening they get there asses kicked and he gets arrested but refuses to give the very unconvincing detective (Takako Haywood) his name before being promptly being bailed out by Finch on one condition, he has to work for him.

John Reese seemed to be completely disinterested during the first hour, maybe that's just until him and Finch get to know more about each other.  The computer is a good idea but, it doesn't give a name just a social security number (SSN), the computer also can't predict how a person will be involved in a crime (victim/suspect/witness etc).  The idea of a secret sect of the government, ghost's if you like reminds me of a popular UK TV show called The Fixer, which in my opinion is a lot better than this.  The computer idea obviously comes from Minority Report, problem for this computer it's not quite as clever as the one that was used during the movie.

They have done six episodes up to now and for me I'm not so sure this show will grab peoples interest, there is plenty ass kicking and you hope that following the introduction to the characters and their backing story that the show will have something to build on, I wouldn't say I was board at any point and the episode did provide you with a little twist.  I think J.J. Abrams may well be using this to keep his name in the TV spotlight as he is currently producing Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol and has a new show coming named Alcatraz which seems a lot more promising than this one.