Post by bobdoc on Sept 16, 2011 13:23:41 GMT -4
Michael contributes a few quotes to this USA TODAY article on the show, at www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/story/2011-09-14/person-of-interest-emerson-caviezel-nolan/50408926/1
NEW YORK – Sitting at a window booth in a nondescript diner on Third Avenue, John Reese and a mysterious Mr. Finch eye each other warily as cameras (both TV and hidden) capture each glance.
Finch rebuffs a simple question about how often he visits as an "interrogation technique" that won't work. "No question is ever innocent from you," he says. Reese: "You're paranoid." Finch: "With good reason."
The scene isn't some Cold War spy caper but new CBS drama Person of Interest, a puzzle-filled action series created by Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento) and produced by J.J. Abrams.
It marks a key addition for the top-rated network and inherits CBS' key Thursday 9 ET/PT slot next week from CSI (which moves to Wednesdays).
Finch (Michael Emerson, Lost's Machiavellian Benjamin Linus) is a reclusive billionaire, and Reese (James Caviezel, who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ), is his muscular but damaged recruit, an ex-CIA agent thought dead.
The show's conceit is that a machine Finch helped build to track global mayhem also collected (but discarded) all sorts of information about lesser "irrelevant" crimes.
Finch, who is now disabled, uses a backdoor entry to the top-secret computer to learn the Social Security numbers of people about to be involved in those crimes as either victims or perpetrators. (The machine can't tell which.)
Finch enlists Reese to help prevent those crimes from happening.
Interest combines a sturdy CBS-style case-of-the-week procedural formula with the serialized back stories of Reese, Finch, their motives and their machine, told in occasional flashbacks.
"I liked the paranoid, urban, downbeat feeling of it," Emerson says. "There's a romance that comes with the noir-y feeling of dread and surveillance. It appeals to me perversely."
Caviezel was looking to play a variation on 24's Jack Bauer: "You have a guy who's very well-equipped to handle vigilante justice in taking care of things."
The idea, Nolan's first TV project, sprung from his long interest in information-age overload, enabled in part by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which led law-enforcement agencies to take surveillance to a new level.
"People support a little bit of a tradeoff in privacy, so if there are large-scale catastrophes we can prevent them from happening," he says. "I was fascinated by the information that goes by the wayside — listening for chatter about terrorist attacks, but hearing about marital infidelities and gangland stuff.
"The show is about two guys interacting with an all-seeing machine that can't communicate with them beyond a string of nine numbers," Nolan says. "We have all this information, but getting the relevant pieces out of it is tough."
Executive producer Greg Plageman says the two main characters are complementary, "an eccentric software billionaire who comes to a crisis of conscience in the wake of 9/11, but whose hands are tied in terms of how much he can accomplish, so he needs someone like Reese, who's also a man of action. Both people are very private, but the fun of it is how much each character knows about the other."
Back to that scene in the diner. Their dynamic? "Uneasy, fractious, suspicious, I guess," Emerson says. "The question viewers will have is why do they even go to the trouble to work together since they're such a seemingly odd match. They're both driven for their own personal reasons … and the friction is the fun of the show and gives it a dramatic edge."
Finch rebuffs a simple question about how often he visits as an "interrogation technique" that won't work. "No question is ever innocent from you," he says. Reese: "You're paranoid." Finch: "With good reason."
The scene isn't some Cold War spy caper but new CBS drama Person of Interest, a puzzle-filled action series created by Jonathan Nolan (The Dark Knight, Memento) and produced by J.J. Abrams.
It marks a key addition for the top-rated network and inherits CBS' key Thursday 9 ET/PT slot next week from CSI (which moves to Wednesdays).
Finch (Michael Emerson, Lost's Machiavellian Benjamin Linus) is a reclusive billionaire, and Reese (James Caviezel, who played Jesus in The Passion of the Christ), is his muscular but damaged recruit, an ex-CIA agent thought dead.
The show's conceit is that a machine Finch helped build to track global mayhem also collected (but discarded) all sorts of information about lesser "irrelevant" crimes.
Finch, who is now disabled, uses a backdoor entry to the top-secret computer to learn the Social Security numbers of people about to be involved in those crimes as either victims or perpetrators. (The machine can't tell which.)
Finch enlists Reese to help prevent those crimes from happening.
Interest combines a sturdy CBS-style case-of-the-week procedural formula with the serialized back stories of Reese, Finch, their motives and their machine, told in occasional flashbacks.
"I liked the paranoid, urban, downbeat feeling of it," Emerson says. "There's a romance that comes with the noir-y feeling of dread and surveillance. It appeals to me perversely."
Caviezel was looking to play a variation on 24's Jack Bauer: "You have a guy who's very well-equipped to handle vigilante justice in taking care of things."
The idea, Nolan's first TV project, sprung from his long interest in information-age overload, enabled in part by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which led law-enforcement agencies to take surveillance to a new level.
"People support a little bit of a tradeoff in privacy, so if there are large-scale catastrophes we can prevent them from happening," he says. "I was fascinated by the information that goes by the wayside — listening for chatter about terrorist attacks, but hearing about marital infidelities and gangland stuff.
"The show is about two guys interacting with an all-seeing machine that can't communicate with them beyond a string of nine numbers," Nolan says. "We have all this information, but getting the relevant pieces out of it is tough."
Executive producer Greg Plageman says the two main characters are complementary, "an eccentric software billionaire who comes to a crisis of conscience in the wake of 9/11, but whose hands are tied in terms of how much he can accomplish, so he needs someone like Reese, who's also a man of action. Both people are very private, but the fun of it is how much each character knows about the other."
Back to that scene in the diner. Their dynamic? "Uneasy, fractious, suspicious, I guess," Emerson says. "The question viewers will have is why do they even go to the trouble to work together since they're such a seemingly odd match. They're both driven for their own personal reasons … and the friction is the fun of the show and gives it a dramatic edge."