Why do people keep only mentioning season 1 of Westworld (which was just okay) when talking about Jonathan Nolan's solo works, when Person of Interest (which is legitimately great) exists?

Maybe your personal tastes don't align with the majority?

> Considering what Jonathan Nolan did in WW S1

are you forgetting about the entirety of Person of Interest?

and that too, of course

Jonathan > Christopher, IMO. Keep Christopher away from anything Jonathan does, thank you.

I'm really looking forward to Jonathan's Fallout show

Is POI good good or like, good for a procedural good? Tempted to hunt it down and give it a try

It is better than pretty the vast majority of procedurals

A bit spoilery of an idea of what you are going to deal with

>!First season is pretty much all procedural, but sets up some future stuff. Second season is similar, but leans more into overall mythos and a story arc (and has some great moments). Season 3, it starts leaning hard into overall story and after that it is "What would it be like if there were an unchained AI without any sense of ethics trying to run things?"!<

It is also sort of like a closet superhero show - Jim Caviezel is the hero, Michael Emerson is his Alfred, then he has some other people who help him out, and then there's his Rogues Gallery who pop up from time to time to fuck with him.

If you want to give some episodes a try before watching a bunch, I would recommend watching Pilot (S1E1) and The Witness (S1E7). You could also try Cura Te Ipsum (S1E4).

If you like those, you will enjoy the series - since you will have some episodes that are either pure number of the week, or NotW with some story weaved in.

It's only a true procedural during Season 1, and to a lesser extent Season 2.

Seasons 3-5 are just incredible, and while there is still a case of the week, most of them are directly related to a bigger plot.

It's by far my favorite network TV show ever, and it's not even close.

Despite POI being regularly called a procedural, it's more of a serialized procedural (and only for the first two or three seasons).

In other words, most episodes in the first three seasons have an A plot, a B plot, and a C plot. The B and C plots are highly serialized and continue the ongoing storyline episode to episode. It's just the A plot that is procedural, and if you skip an episode and miss the B and C plots, you'll be lost as to the ongoing storyline. So it's not a procedural where you can duck in and out of episodes and not miss anything, and each episode only focuses on the case of the week. I think there are only two episodes in its entire run that don't have any serialized elements in them.

But regardless of the above, the show is still good good, IMO. If you like Batman, think of the beginning of the show as a realistic take on Batman but with Bruce being split between two characters where one has his looks, fighting and weapons prowess, tragic back story, and vigilante mindset while the other has his genius, charm, social graces, and money. That perspective makes the procedural parts of the episodes much more fun.

How would you rank it against Lost, my personal favourite network tv show?

I like it better than Lost, and the ending is also very satisfactory.

BTW, Michel Emerson is absolutely incredible as Harold Finch in POI

Their best work was them working together.

I don't think Christopher Nolan would ever work on a show. Mostly because he's very pretentious, only works on the big screen.

lol Chris Nolan is way too up his own butthole to do a TV series, at least not while studios are still willing to give him big movie budgets. Maybe some day when that well runs dry but the dude out there literally splitting atoms for our entertainment.

That being said, while I don't hate his movies post split up with Jonah (nor Westworld), I think it's pretty clear that they need each other. The best Nolan movies are clearly the ones he made with his brother.

Then again Nolan made Person of Interest too...

It's legitimately good good. I think some of the episodes are still among the highest rated of all time on IMDB

It's extremely good. Most of season one is just decent but man does it improve in season 2. Seasons 3-5 is up there with the best television I've ever seen.

The show has a phenomenal ending too.

What about the show changes that makes the later seasons so compelling, because I only watched the first season and found it incredibly forgettable and just felt like any other procedural cop show.

If you watched all of the first season and felt like it was just a regular cop procedural then you missed the serialized subplots that were threaded throughout each episode that tied into the overarching narrative.

Eventually the serialized subplots become the full plot instead of subplots though, which is where a lot of people fall in love with the show. I personally liked the mix better than when it went fully serialized, but that's just me.

Oh the projects of theirs I've seen, I think I'd rank them as: Christopher > Both > Both > Both > Both > Both > Jonathan > Both > Christopher > Christopher > Christopher > Jonathan > Christopher

My favorite and least favorite are solo Christophers, but I have to agree that on average I tend to like them working together the best.

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>Is POI good good or like, good for a procedural good?

It's half of the best of both worlds.

If you're a boomer who likes your comfortable procedurals, the latter parts of the show might seem to "drift into the weeds" going deeper down the rabbit hole into complex hard sci-fi concepts about AI.

If you're a Severance fan who wants that deep, hard sci-fi packaged concisely, then you might feel bogged down having to sit through 103 episodes of procedurals to "get to the point".

It tries to be both and succeeds more than it fails. Some of the seemingly-one-off characters end up popping back up and joining the serialized story.

The show aired from 2011-2016, just when our appetites were changing.

All in all, I'd say that the show is a bit like eating ribs. It's too much effort for too little meat, but there's no denying that the meat you get is damn good. But if you're a nut for AI plotlines and feel the need to consume them all, then I'd say PoI is worth the effort.

Lost is my personal favorite network TV show as well, and I prefer Lost. During its first three seasons, Person of Interest definitely felt like it might be competing with one of my top spots and giving Lost a challenge, but I was less of a fan of some of the developments in the last two seasons, which dropped it down. POI is probably around my 13th favorite network TV show. If you drop animated shows and shows that didn't get a planned conclusion, it might be my 6th favorite. So it's up there for me, but I did have some issues with it as it went on.

It’s fantastic

some episodes are bad guy of the week, but then it gets this big overarching conspiracy and gets much better. I really wish it had kept going

Oh I saw it, but b-plots threading through a procedural show was already quite common in various detective/legal/cop shows by that time and I didn't really see anything that was exceptionally interesting about it, while all of the crime drama was really bland and uninteresting. Is there something about the subplot that really develops and gets interesting?

Without spoiling too much, the next couple of seasons goes way deeper in the HR/corruption angles, while building up the angle of the Machine as a character on it's own, as a Super AI. If you want more spoilers I can give it, I am just on my third rewatch of the show so it's pretty fresh

I'm curious, of their work, which won was the one you liked the least?

Insomnia for Christopher (I know some people really like it, but it wasn't for me), Westworld for Jonathan (I really liked the premise but struggled to finish the first season because the only characters I found likable kept getting killed off or were robots that I felt no stakes for), and Memento for both (don't get me wrong, I LOVED Memento the first time I watched it, but every time I rewatch it I find myself liking it a little bit less as I've found that the best parts of the movie are the novelty and the twists which lose their punch on repeated viewings... and I've rewatched Memento at least four times).

Todd Howard being involved with it makes it all the more exciting.

Whichever season has If-Then-Else, legitimately I don't know what the writers were on but every episode was insanely good

Those B plots become A plots.

and the machine becomes a character

Season 4.

So around the end of season 2/start of season 3 they close up the crime drama aspect and make it more about the A.I and originations surrounding the A.I.

In terms of plot development it's a lot like Fringe, in that seasons one and two you're not sure if it's going to become more or less serialized and then after that it leans really heavily into the sci-fi aspects.

Person of Interest was a network show that was always on the verge of being cancelled starring two character actors. It was also a procedural for the first part of it's run, which makes it harder to convince hard sci-fi fans to watch it.

Westworld was an HBO prestige drama with a huge, extremely well known cast and a sizable budget. For the first two seasons it was very popular, and it was heavily serialized similar to Lost.

I also prefer Person of Interest to Westworld, but it makes perfect sense to me that it's not as popular.

I might have to give it a second shot.

That is what I tell people about the Good wife which is also often called procedural.