Sam's Backup Page ([personal profile] cblj_backup) wrote2012-01-08 10:52 am

(no subject)

I am not too hung over today! I feel a bit triumphant about that.

I am, however, very congested. So I'm spending the day in bed watching TV.

Have you guys seen this show Person Of Interest? My parents really like it and I thought I'd watch it. I downloaded the first ten episodes and I've seen the first few, and to my surprise it's really good. To my even bigger surprise, it's apparently crazy popular, and its ratings haven't really dipped at all since it came on the air in the fall.

It's a weird little show, kind of a fusion of crime procedural and cyberthriller. It's dark and really ambiguous, morally and in a storytelling sense -- one of the episodes I just watched is a little bit hinkey on gender issues, but it has the most fantastic lack-of-ending I've seen on a TV show in a long time, where you just...don't find out what happened.

A huge chunk of the overall premise concerns how and where the American government monitors its citizens, and how fragile our idea of our personal security really is in the digital age, and there's an ongoing theme that's a sort of meditation on war and its effect on individuals as well as our society. It's not necessarily an issues show in the way some shows are, where the characters openly debate political questions as sort of soapbox-beings for the writers, but the questions just hover in the background constantly.

Plus it has what basically amounts to Batman without the cape, running around New York saving people at the behest of a sarcastic, reclusive billionaire puppetmaster.

I don't know if there's a fandom for it but it hasn't pinged any of my radars, which is interesting. Anyway, I might do a recc post for it later if it continues to be awesome, we shall see.

[identity profile] goseaward.livejournal.com 2012-01-09 12:54 am (UTC)(link)
I seem to remember reading somewhere that the pilot for Person of Interest had the highest test-audience ratings the network had seen in years (or maybe had ever seen). I don't think the ratings are stellar though ("could go either way" on the TVLine renewal score card but the latest tv by the numbers (http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2011/12/13/cbs-unforgettable-csiny-downgraded-to-likely-canceled-mentalist-person-of-interest-csi-upgraded-to-likely-renewed/113571/) put its at a likely renewal).

[identity profile] copperbadge.livejournal.com 2012-01-10 12:02 pm (UTC)(link)
Ah, okay, I thought it was the pilot that got high ratings, not the pilot test -- still, it hasn't declined much since the pilot aired, which is a good thing. I suspected it might crash and burn.