Person of Interest ends its five season run on CBS tonight, and Deadline Hollywood interviewed series Co-creator Jonathan Nolan on aspects of the show, including how the format was heavily influenced by The X-Files and the time spent collaborating with his brother on the Dark Knight films:
...the series grew out of my kind of hangover from working on the Batman franchise for 10 years. I’m very proud of those movies but one of the things that you don’t really get to do when you’re doing a Batman movie is you don’t get to tell the little stories in between that actually make Batman who Batman is. Batman is about rescuing ordinary people from random acts of violence. That’s a huge part of the character. There are these great mythological villains that he winds up battling but the essence of that character, like Superman, is someone who’s this watcher out there in the night who’s trying to prevent people from coming to the same kind of random tragedy that struck down his parents.
So coming out of 10 years of that I was like I want to write the stories in between as well. Person Of Interest grew out of a lot of that impulse. Just like with the Batman movies, from the beginning — and this is something we talked about with J.J. right up front — the show lent itself to an approach in which you would build great, serialized villains within the storytelling.
I think regular watchers of the show can see that many of the trappings of the Caped Crusader made it into the show as well, from Jim Caviezel's hushed-voiced action hero Mr. Reese and his no-kill policy (although routinely shooting out kneecaps seems to be fair game), to alliances with honest detectives among crooked police forces, warring mob leaders, and secret headquarters. All of this was set against a long-running (and very comic-bookish) mythology about the rise and consequences of Artificial Intelligence for humanity.
Is Jonathan Nolan right about what makes Batman who he is? And do you think that a toned-down version of the Dark Knight on television that traded big (expensive) action set-pieces for more personal stories involving detective work and protecting the average innocent civilian from less-grandiose badguys would work, or would audiences quickly demand that every episode be a showdown with a marquee villain and dismiss everything else as "filler"?
Tune in tonight to see if the heroes can take down the A.I. Samaritan's grip on humanity in the final Person of Interest, and visit the source for more from Jonathon Nolan and show-runner Greg Plageman.
ComicBookMovie.com, and/or the user who contributed this post, may earn commissions or revenue through clicks or purchases made through any third-party links contained within the content above.