While Philip K. Dick and George Orwell changed sci-fi literature decades apart, one CBS sci-fi series from Jonathan Nolan and JJ Abrams managed to mix their best stories in one iconic five-season show. While cyberpunk franchises like Robocop have often satirized militarized policing, one of the genre’s earliest literary legends offered a particularly influential critique of policing. Eight years before he published his seminal dystopian noir Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Phillip K. Dick penned the novelette “The Minority Report.”
Later loosely adapted into a movie of the same name by Steven Spielberg, “The Minority Report” focused on a group of mutant “precogs” who can predict crime before it occurs, allowing the police’s Precrime division to arrest offenders before they even commit the crimes they are accused of. If this premise seems familiar, that might be because George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984 featured a similar premise with the fictional Thought Police and their investigation of Thoughtcrime.
While Dick’s Blade Runner franchise questioned how much sentience and autonomy artificial intelligent beings had, both “The Minority Report” and 1984 considered the moral weight of a criminal justice system that convicted potential offenders based on perceived intention instead of actual evidence. This chilling premise provided the backbone for the story of CBS’s five-season hit Person of Interest, a collaboration between Jonathan Nolan and JJ Abrams.
Person of Interest Mixed Minority Report and 1984 In Its Sci-fi Dystopia Plot
After the massive success of the influential ABC series Lost, executive producer Abrams and future Westworld/ Fallout creator Nolan collaborated on 2011’s Person of Interest. The series starred Jim Caviezel’s former CIA operative John Reese as the first field agent for “The Machine,” a computer program created by the reclusive, eccentric billionaire, Harold Finch. Supposedly, “The Machine” canpredict and track down potential terrorists before they strike.
While the Machine is used by the government to avoid large-scale catastrophes, Finch hires Reese to instead track down individual murderers before they commit their comparatively small-scale crimes. Engaging with questions of free will, determinism, the right to privacy, censorship, surveillance, and moral relativism, Person of Interest was a show with a lot on its mind. Fortunately, it was also a lot of fun.
One of the most purely enjoyable sci-fi police procedurals since The X-Files pioneered the genre blend in the ‘90s, Person of Interest took the weighty, ambitious themes of Abrams’ earlier Fringe and blended them with the crowd-pleasing police procedural format of Law & Order, CSI, or Criminal Minds. It didn’t hurt that the show had an astounding supporting cast, including Taraji P. Henson, Kevin Chapman, Amy Acker, and Michael Emerson as the morally ambiguous Finch.
Person of Interest Paved The Way For Even More Ambitious Sci-fi Shows
Person of Interest was lauded by critics, who noted that the longer the show went on, the more it moved past straightforward procedural thrills to engage more deeply with the moral issues at the core of its story. Thus, the CBS series might have been a mainstream network TV hit, but its success helped pave the way for more ambitious and openly cerebral sci-fi TV shows like Apple TV’s Foundation, Severance, and Dark Matter, Netflix’s Altered Carbon, and Hulu’s dystopian thriller Paradise.
Paradise even starred Person of Interest’s Sarah Shahi, who played Sameen Shaw in seasons 3-5 of the hit series. Thus, from elevating actors in the genre to introducing mainstream audiences to its high-concept, morally fraught premise, Person of Interest managed to make dystopian sci-fi not just accessible, but essential viewing. By the 2020s, the impact of Person of Interest’s fast-paced but smart mix of Philip K. Dick and George Orwell is obvious from one glance at the sci-fi shows on major streaming services.
- Release Date
-
2011 – 2016-00-00
- Showrunner
-
Greg Plageman
- Directors
-
Chris Fisher, Richard J. Lewis, Fred Toye, Jeffrey G. Hunt, Stephen Surjik, Kenneth Fink, Stephen Williams, Helen Shaver, Alrick Riley, Charles Beeson, Kate Woods, Kevin Bray, Stephen Semel, Jeff T. Thomas, Sylvain White, Alex Zakrzewski, Brad Anderson, Clark Johnson, Colin Bucksey, David Semel, Dennis Smith, Félix Enríquez Alcalá, James Whitmore Jr., Jeffrey Lee Gibson
- Writers
-
Jonathan Nolan, Denise Thé, Greg Plageman, Amanda Segel, David Slack, Melissa Scrivner-Love, Dan Dietz, Sean Hennen, Lucas O’Connor, Patrick Harbinson, Michael Sopczynski, Nic Van Zeebroeck, Tony Camerino, Andy Callahan, Ray Utarnachitt, Sabir Pirzada, Ashley Gable, Amy Berg, Jacey Heldrich
:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc():focal(471x244:473x246)/CNN-New-Years-Eve-with-Anderson-Cooper-123124-9952e5f00fc1425f87113ba2bfb97b29.jpg "Anderson Cooper Says He Once ‘Hated’ New Year’s Eve While Co-Hosting CNN Broadcast")
