The tight shots in Person of Interest also help convey the post-9/11 claustrophobia that is central to the show.
"The public wanted to be protected," Mr. Finch tells Mr. Reese, lead characters who are officially listed as dead and who are anonymous enough not to need first names. "They just didn't want to know how they were being protected. . . . The machine is everywhere, watching us with 10,000 eyes and listening with a million ears."
Reese actually was inquiring about a different machine, one that spits out the Social Security numbers of New Yorkers about to be involved in violent crime. Finch developed it for the government to identify terrorists, but he kept a secret entry for himself.
The gimpy, punctilious, cold-blooded Finch, a perfectly cast Michael Emerson (Ben Linus in Lost), wants to stop the crimes, but he needs an operative. That would be super-duper killer spy Reese, who is sometimes so good at his job that it's almost funny.
Handsome Jim Caviezel, who was Mel Gibson's Jesus in The Passion of the Christ, will give the ladies something to look at, as he cuts a broad swath through the criminals, aided by the latest surveillance gear and the biggest guns.
Sometimes the pattern-recognizing computer identifies a potential victim, sometimes a potential wrongdoer. Neither Finch nor Reese nor the audience knows which it is at first - part of the show's appeal.
Of course, it all sounds preposterous, but so did a movie about a guy who remembered everything backward, and Jonathan Nolan was nominated for a writing Oscar for Memento. The Lost team of J.J. Abrams and Bryan Burk are also on board.
