My Favourite Show Is On Netflix—Could It Mean Something?

It was seven years ago when the most-talked-about show currently on streaming started airing. The Boys bowed out earlier this month with a finale that saw Billy Butcher finally end Homelander with a bloody scalping-decapitation, the narcissistic supe nearing the conclusion of the campaign to deem him God. The convenient and predictable death meted out to the psychotic tyrant united viewers in dissatisfaction. But the truth is that the show had been slipping since the fourth season, and became increasingly dependent on shock value over the drama and satire that brought it its promise.

But The Boys is mostly a segue here.

What I actually mean is, about seven years ago, too, The Guardian ran an essay on how Artificial Intelligence, an increasingly real threat, was about to hit our lives like an avalanche. Written entirely by GPT 3 and titled “A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?” it was interpreted across newsrooms like ours as an early warning on how technology was about to run writers out of jobs.

The times weren’t as dire back then and around the same time, at the suggestion of a colleague, I started watching Person of Interest. I was thoroughly skeptical at first because ours was a clique of bros in their mid-20s who bonded over rejecting everyday joys. In the beginning, the lead character’s backstory, with a lost-love angle and recurring milk-and-honey flashbacks, began to feel a bit maudlin. 

But, like Breaking Bad taught us—which was fast acclimating to the whirlwind bends of streaming stories—with prestige TV, one needed to be patient.

The first few episodes followed a template set early into the show: Harold Finch, a reclusive billionaire with a conscience that wasn’t quite billionaire-like, hires John Reese, a burned-out CIA operative to save citizens of New York City from planned murders. The billionaire and the enforcer went about identifying potential victims or, perpetrators, and putting them out of harm’s way (or harm’s way out of them). This continued for the first dozen or so episodes as a whole tableaux of city residents—high-flying working professionals, scrupulous judges, unscrupulous pharma barons, delinquent children and nameless Cold War-era spies walking the streets for revenge—was painted before us. But on the sidelines, a deeper back story involving the dirty affairs of espionage and mob violence, settled in the vacant slots of the narrative.

What especially had me invested in the first two seasons was HR—the ring of corrupt NYPD officers and city officials functioning as a shadow government. As Finch and Reese cultivate a team, including a cute Belgian Malinois named Bear, to handle the fast-complicating business of crime, they run into HR frequently. This dirty syndicate brings a particularly horrific kind of evil to the silos of mal-intention Team Machine is fighting. Through their consolidation and eventual neutralisation, the HR ends up binding the forces of good together in a glue of camaraderie and moral calling that’s really a thing of the past.

The system of surveillance Finch built, simply named “The Machine”, watches and hears people from public camera systems and all forms of digital communications. The input is absolute and comprehensive—the output, minimal and singular by design. Based on probable incidence of a crime being planned by a perp, the Machine alerts its maker by giving him a number corresponding to the target. This is, as Finch explains at the beginning of the show, an “Irrelevant” list of people that he initially designed to self-erase each midnight, when the “Relevant” list would be sent out to be dealt with by state security.

The ethical concerns around unregulated artificial intelligence and large-scale data mining that Person of Interest—which Netflix brought to its library earlier this month—addressed over a decade ago (it aired from 2011 to 2016) ought to serve as a reminder for our age. We have a new bogey to contend with—data centres and the likelihood of them drying up whatever groundwater our large population struggles for. Their large-scale arrival in India is underway as the country careens into a confused AI industrial revolution. More information and examples on the slow devastation it promises to wreak are available than in the time POI was said to have predicted the shady activities Edward Snowden blew the whistle on.

In a time when accountability is all but gone from our beliefs and codes, what’s endearing about Finch’s Machine is that it’s part of a world where superintelligence is endowed with a system of moral concerns. Finch, a modern-day Frankenstein, is tormented no end by the consequences of his creation and the burden of the mechanics of intrusion and manipulation he has introduced into the world. Racked with guilt, limp-gaited and cagey, Finch feels obligated to save whatever lives he can corresponding to the information delivery system he’s helped create. His bond with the Machine involves a strict system of accountability and its growing ‘instincts’ for survival and evolution through the seasons, coupled with the fact that it will never be witnessed with an existence, all render it a compelling character that gets written as a byproduct of everything else on the show.

And then, who can forget the superb music? Ramin Djawadi not only composed the original score and soundtrack, but also overlaid some of its most memorable sequences with masterful needle drops. As the 21st episode of the first season closes on a melancholic note for Reese, Revenge by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse plays in the background. The groovy opening riff of Sinnerman, when the Elias reveal lands in episode seven of the same season. Hurt by Johnny Cash whispering as a devastating sequence plays out in the third season. Welcome to the Machine by Pink Floyd, I’m Afraid of Americans by David Bowie, The Day the World Went Away by Nine Inch Nails. All placed impeccably and picturised to thrill.

A couple of weeks ago, I embarked on another POI binge with my wife, having sorely missed it for a good three years on Amazon Prime Video. I’d stare at the screen in a nonchalant sort of pleased immersion, quickly steal a glance at her for any signs of approval. I didn’t quite know what to do when she was on to Elias very quickly (and was proven right later) even as I tried to throw her off, or when she immediately identified a future romance between Zoe Morgan and Reese. 

But, if we’re being honest, this is not the kind of show that counts too much on its reveals or high science. It’s more about the way technology behaves and patterns emerge in the larger picture—the politics and intrigue, if you will, of it all. There’s the drama and the writing. One of its most complex and entertaining characters is Root (Amy Acker), a nihilistic and sadistic assassin whose arc carries much of the later season. She appears in several high-stakes situations during the course of the show, including the memorable episode “If-Then-Else” that I will never stop using as a pitch to sell Person of Interest.

As the plot hurtles through hour-long 20-odd-episode seasons, all involved parties march in a danse macabre towards more dangerous antagonists and networks. Team Machine encounters a formidable adversary—establishing a duality between good and bad that our world could do with today—and the “Relevant” and “Irrelevant” lists collide in all sorts of ways. The later seasons shine an uncomfortable light on fascist state policies and the arms machinery that keeps getting summoned into existence for the cause of national security. And it all delivers some brilliant fight sequences and rocket-launcher badassery from John Reese, dressed in black Hugo Boss suits.

One knife fight comes to mind. Protecting a crucial person of interest, Reese has to get into a scuffle with a dangerous adversary—in a restaurant kitchen. The scene depicts some superb close-contact combat but also a thrilling conclusion that demonstrates the kind of value system this show endorses.

Person of Interest might have started airing a decade-and-a-half ago, but I haven’t felt a greater need than now to bring back its POV on technology, national security and intelligence. Watch it, you might agree.