It'd be marvellous if writers about TV could spend a few years never mentioning Lost at the drop of a hat,[note]I enjoyed that show a lot, including the ending, but enough time has elapsed that surely we can stop pretending that every bit of prestige TV is secretly either aping Lost or bravely showing us where Lost went wrong?[/note] but otherwise Person Of Interest Was Anti-Prestige TV And Too Smart For Primetime is a pretty great tribute to a genuinely great show that never got the credit it deserved.
Reese and Shaw are brute-force objects, fighting for what they believe is right. Root and Finch argue over letting the machine free, with Finch understanding that his Machine is just another interpretation of Samaritan, with Root's belief that Samaritan is simply a badly taught God. Fusco, even when he knows the full scale of the stakes, acts as moral anchor. Faced with two giant computers fighting a global war, he mostly says things like "What the fuck?" and "All right, I'll shoot at the bad men, but there better be a hot dog in it for me."
And that's the beautiful thing: You view the whole struggle from varied but understandable perspectives. That's just sharp TV writing. You see the plot for what it is, you know who dies or survives, you know why things happen and who everyone is, and you are never thrown into the quagmire of Lost. I've deliberately left out the fact that J.J. Abrams was an executive producer of Person of Interest as it feels so distinctly not like the J.J. Abrams of Lost. It certainly feels more like Alias, with an ensemble cast, a shadowy enemy, a truly shitty bad guy (Arvin Sloane is a top-10 television shithead) - but it corrects many of that show's mistakes. Person of Interest rarely leads you astray, avoids red herrings and rewards you for watching flashbacks. It's a show with little filler, few eye-rolling twists, and yet deals with some absolutely batshit science-fiction elements.
It's a crying shame that Peter Watts never got to release his tie-in novel for the show.