If someone told me that the five broadcast TV networks were being eliminated and I could pick one show of their current lineups to save, I'd pick Person of Interest.

Jim Caviezel a former covert operative, living off the grid as a sad homeless man until a violent encounter on a subway brings him to the attention of the police and a reclusive computer genius, played by Michael Emerson. Emerson's Mr. Finch has access to a list of people who are about to be involved in a premeditated violent crime, as either a victim or perpetrator, and he needs a man of Caviezel's skills to intervene and forestall those crimes. Caviezel's John Reese is a laconic wounded warrior looking for redemption from a past where his desire to do good was abused, while Finch is gradually revealed to be trying to make amends for a self-perceived failure to use his knowledge for good. The rest of the initial regular cast is Taraji P Henson as a NYPD homicide detective who has Reese's initial case, and later becomes involved in investigating a series of vigilante incidents that arise over the course of the first season, and Kevin Chapman as a corrupt detective whom Reese & Finch try to use for an inside source in the police department. While the heroic trio don't really have much of character arcs, with their development primarily fleshing out their backstories and filling in the blanks of their present state, Chapman's Detective Fusco, who starts out as a kind of buttmonkey, actually changes and even grows, having most of the moral ambiguity in the first season.

As a network show, on the most formulaic of the big three (CBS), Person of Interest can't help being a case-of-the-week procedural (which I'm afraid might make binge watching the early episodes a little tiresome), but by the end of the first season, when they start being allowed to have multiepisode stories, it has put the compulsory formula to good use, developing rapport and relationships among the regulars, and establishing stakes. The second season does an excellent job of expanding the show's universe, and the third season is absolutely awesome. Divided into halves, either half could stand up next to most good cable dramas.

The show is also pretty topical, in that the mechanism of the plot is actually explored in a way that touches on recent concerns about surveillance and the national security apparatus, that resonates with the whole Wikileaks/drone strikes/NSA issue. The source of Finch's list is a ubiquitous surveillance program that makes any other use of those three words as understated as saying Bruce Banner has been known to get upset. The show plays up the sense of surveillance by using security camera footage and graphic representations of eavesdropping networks for establishing shots.

If you're into chicks who are real characters, there is Henson's Detective Carter, who's not just there to look good and fall in love with Reese. Later on, Amy Acker turns up in a recurring role as a psychiatrist whose clientele raise concerns that she might know more than she should. Paige Turco, the attractive April O'Neill from the TMNT movies, is a "fixer" who shows up once or twice a year, appears in command of almost every situation she finds herself in, and whose every line of dialogue with Caviezel sounds like a dirty innuendo. In the second season, Sarah Shahi is introduced as a possibly psychopathic government counterpart to Reese, with an episode where she is the focal character, not just the "person of interest". Camryn Manheim comes along later as the wife of a dying tech genius, grappling with both her husband's dementia and the national security implications of his work. Every word of those descriptions is true, and doesn't come close to tell the story of at least two of those characters.

Another thing I love about the show are the guest stars. There are the usual array of character actors and favorite guest star types, but there are a lot of really good guys (for example, about a half dozen actors from The Wire, whom I've seldom seen anywhere else). Personal favorites who recur include Enrico Colantoni, a schoolteacher who witnesses a mob war hit, Michael Kelly and Boris McGiver, who frequently pop up trying to track down Reese for his past and present actions, Brett Cullen comes up in flashbacks as Finch's former partner, and Ken Leung (Miles, from "Lost" ) as a petty crook who keeps ending up on Reese & Finch's to-do list in the second season to their chagrin.

The series is created by Jonathan Nolan, who is related to Christopher and has evidently paid attention in his stint as a crew member on "The Dark Knight", with his handling of the story of a resourceful urban vigilante and the ethics of surveillance, as the central premise of the show takes Batman's cell phone hacking computer up by an order of magnitude. Honestly, I'd call PoI a better companion show to Christopher's trilogy than the "Gotham" TV show which I also like. And while Finch is as distasteful of firearms as fellow civic-minded billionaire Bruce Wayne, Reese has no such scruples and compromises with his partners qualms (and network's limitations on violence) by expertly shooting a series of criminal kneecaps.

Caviezel plays the earnestly reserved hero he does so well in not enough other works, and his dry snark gives the show a dose of humor. Emerson does some of the same stuff he did so well as Ben Linus in his most famous role, but without suggesting he's playing a type. The pilot features a rather clever shout-out to the old role and at the same time highlighting a difference, by having Finch promise Reese, "they lied to you... I never will." Instead, he puts his verbal skills to work making exposition and infodumping as interesting as it can get. They work well together, and when I re-watched "The Dark Knight" after getting into the show, it struck me that some of the conversations between Alfred & Bruce could have been held between Finch & Reese (in particular the one where Bruce is planning to quit and Alfred asks him not to reveal his role in whole Batman thing and Bruce responds "I'm going to tell them it was your idea." ). For people who are into that kind of thing, it is either shot in New York or a very good facsimile. A number of outdoor scenes actually feel like you're in the city, without having to smell it.

I really like this show. To the point that even though I'm in the middle of watching Sense8, which I have heard a lot of good stuff about, the point where I left off, it's just starting to pick up, and the most sympathetic character is being led into the woods by a death squad, and when I signed on to Netflix and saw Person of Interest on the page, I ignored Sense8 and re-watched the first two episode of PoI.

The more people who watch this, the less chance CBS deepsixes it to make room for another NCISI clone or "comedy" for lack of a better description of most of their shows.