Almost twenty years ago, Christopher Nolan released what many still believe is the greatest comic book film ever made. In many ways, The Dark Knight is the perfect Batman film – even if, at times, it feels like he’s just the sidekick to Heath Ledger’s outstanding Joker. True Dark Knight fans know that Jonathan Nolan is the true unsung hero of this story. Christopher Nolan’s younger brother has written some of the filmmaker’s most successful films, including two out of three movies in his Batman trilogy and Interstellar.
Fresh off the success of The Dark Knight, in 2011, Jonathan tackled his biggest project yet: writing, directing, and producing a crime drama. Person of Interest was the series Batman fans always wanted, even if they didn’t know it yet.
Person of Interest focuses on two very different main characters who are like two sides of the same coin. John Reese, a crestfallen Special Forces operative living as a drifter in New York City, meets with his polar opposite, Harold Finch: a billionaire genius obsessed with stopping crime. It’s almost like seeing Bruce Wayne split into his two personas.
While Reese is the “action man,” Finch tends to the Machine, a special computer system that monitors all electronic communications and is aimed at stopping crime before it materializes. It’s a similar concept to Batman’s Batcomputer at the end of The Dark Knight, the one that almost forces Lucius Fox to resign.
At its core, Person of Interest continues the themes of The Dark Knight: Is this type of overbearing surveillance worth it? Losing personal liberties in the name of national security was a very real threat and the center of political discourse in post-9/11 America. One could say that this narrative feels even more at home in Person of Interest than it ever does in The Dark Knight.
Making it a series (with five seasons, no less) gave Jonathan Nolan a chance to develop the show’s themes and characters even better. It’s no surprise to see that this was the show that gave him the chance to develop Westworld a few years later.
This show had virtually every element you would ever need for a successful Batman live-action series: you have the vigilante justice, a moral code focused on minimizing casualties and protecting the innocent, and Nolan even gave NYC that borderline mystic aura of Gotham City. All that was missing was someone with a twisted fascination for flying mammals, and this could have easily been a Batman show.
Unfortunately for Person of Interest fans, the show met with a rather untimely finale after Season 5. Simply put, the series was becoming too ambitious for CBS. Even if it was one of the network’s top performers, it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify the show’s production costs.
Thankfully, streaming services have given Person of Interest a chance to shine with new fans. The series is available for streaming on Netflix in most of the world, while American viewers can find Person of Interest on Amazon Prime Video. Seeing as we now live in an age of revivals and reboots, there might be a time when Person of Interest is finally allowed to conclude its amazing story. I mean, if Malcolm in the Middle can get a revival, so can this hidden gem.
