I watch a lot of TV. While I enjoyed the first 5 seasons of Sons of Anarchy, this last season ended with me wondering if I will even bother with season 7. With SoA over, I needed something else to watch. Since I tend to watch more cop shows than any other genre, I decided to give Person of Interest a shot. Here was a show that appealed to my love of cop shows, but also my inner-geek. An advanced computer system with access to massive quantities of covert surveillance data (“1984? Yeah right, man. That’s a typo. Orwell is here now. He’s livin’ large.”) provides the heroes with the social security number of a potential victim or perpetrator.
Hitting on my nostalgia for Quantum Leap, I was instantly hooked and spent all of Christmas break watching every episode. Adding Sarah Shahi as Shaw cemented Person of Interest in my must watch list. And when Detective Joss Carter was killed off, I almost cried. Person of Interest was great. When the last episode, “Aletheia” came to an end, I was left needing a show to watch. Thankfully, CBS was premiering a new show titled Intelligence.
Intelligence stars Josh Holloway as Gabriel, a Cyber Command Op with a computer chip in his brain, Marg Helgenberger as Lillian and Meghan Ory as Secret Service Agent Riley. Obviously, my inner-geek was again piqued. Intelligence has fancy computer graphics and geek-speak to assist operations, and most importantly, much like Person of Interest, it has Gabriel punching and shooting bad guys.
As I watched the first episode, I tried really hard to be interested. Instead, I was left feeling empty. Intelligence turned out to be a bland television show. Here’s a show that could go farther than Person of Interest and delve into the moral, ethical and psychological implications of a man hardwired into the matrix, but instead CBS gave us John Reese without Harold Finch. The lone bright spot to the show is the “virtual evidence walls” Gabriel walks around in, reminding me of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Holodeck with a touch of Hannibal‘s Will Graham’s crime scene profiles.
As the pilot came to a close, you see the Chinese operative who had the second computer chip implanted into her brain wake up. While intriguing, it clicked with me this was another take on Person of Interest’s, Amy Acker’s “Root” character.
In the end, I don’t see Intelligence keeping my interest on a weekly basis, and I will probably wait until this summer to watch the rest of season one, if it lasts that long.
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