Jonathan Nolan’s surveillance thriller starts as a tidy case-of-the-week procedural and turns, over five seasons, into something stranger and better about a machine that watches everyone. Michael Emerson is the reason to stay; the formula is the reason some will not.
Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote The Dark Knight with his brother, made a series for a network best known for tidy crime procedurals and hid inside it one of the more paranoid ideas on American television. A machine watches everyone. It was built to catch terrorists, and the murders and kidnappings it also predicts are thrown away as irrelevant. Two men decide to do something about the irrelevant ones, one a week. It is a better show than that sounds, and it takes its time getting there: five seasons and 103 episodes, from 22 September 2011 to 2016.
Michael Emerson is the reason to stay. Harold Finch walks with a hitch, holds his neck as if it might snap, wears a three-piece suit to sit at a computer and speaks to Reese in the tone of a man correcting a waiter. He is a billionaire atoning for something, and Emerson never shows us the size of the guilt, only its symptoms: the fussiness, the refusal to be touched, the flatness whenever his past comes up. It is funny, quietly, and sad without asking to be. When a later episode leaves him alone in the library talking to his own creation, we were moved more than we expected to be by a man and a monitor, and it was because Emerson had spent so many hours refusing to raise his voice.
Jim Caviezel is harder to love. He plays John Reese in a whisper and a dark suit, and for the first stretch he is a man with a gun and no interior. The reviews so far noticed the same thing and we do not disagree, though the blankness turns out to be a decision rather than a shortfall; Reese has concluded he is already dead, and the series slowly explains why. Taraji P. Henson’s Joss Carter, the detective who hunts the man in the suit and then finds she cannot arrest him in good conscience, carries the moral weight Caviezel withholds. Kevin Chapman’s Lionel Fusco, the crooked cop blackmailed into helping, carries the jokes, and Chapman plays him as a man permanently one bad decision from being shot or fired and unsure which he would prefer.
The look is the surveillance itself. Scenes are stitched together with footage from the Machine’s point of view, grainy angles from high corners with a box drawn round each face, white for the team, yellow for people it knows, red for the ones about to do harm. Ramin Djawadi scores it with clipped electronic pulses and something like a clock ticking underneath, and gives the Machine a theme of its own that turns up whenever the screen belongs to the Machine alone and no person is in shot. Juliet Polcsa and Gary Jones keep Reese in the same suit through car crashes and shoot-outs, and put Finch in pocket squares. Nolan directs some episodes himself; Chris Fisher and Richard J. Lewis are among the rotating directors who keep New York grey and wet.
The first season is where patience is needed. Twenty-three episodes is a great many, and the formula is rigid: number arrives, Reese follows, Finch types, Reese shoots someone in the knee, number goes home. Around the middle of that run we were bored, and then annoyed that a premise this good was being spent on a bodyguard job of the week. The show knows. It brings in Enrico Colantoni as Carl Elias, a soft-spoken man assembling a criminal empire from a back room, and Robert John Burke and Al Sapienza as police officers considerably dirtier than Fusco, and the weekly numbers begin to join up.
By the second season, when Sarah Shahi’s Sameen Shaw arrives with even fewer feelings than Reese, the series is about the Machine rather than the people it points at. What is it. Does it think. What does Finch owe a thing he built and then chained. The later seasons take a turn we will not describe; we will say that a network procedural about a helpful computer ends up asking harder questions about being watched than most films on the subject, and that the final run of thirteen episodes is the tightest the show ever managed.
Watch it at home, in a run rather than a week apart, and give it until Elias. If the whisper wears on you, remember that Reese is meant to be a man who has forgotten how to talk to people, and that the show, unlike its lead, never stops talking to you.
