Eric Goldman: After five years on the air, what's it like now for you both to see the show end?
Greg Plageman: This year sort of unfolded in a bittersweet way. It's very difficult because you want to devote yourself to one thing and other people want you onto the next thing. When other people start talking about the next thing you sort of know the thing you're working on is about to experience its demise. You don't feel that way necessarily in the moment, so that part's just weird to me.
Jonathan Nolan: Greg's been through this a couple times but this is my first trip to the rodeo and it's heartbreaking. Everyone's so great. The cast, the crew, the writing staff, the support staff, in [both] New York and LA. It's a big community. It was just an extraordinary experience. And these characters too, I will dearly dearly miss writing for them and thinking about them and they become part of your life as well. As Greg said, in this business it can be, "What's the next thing?" and that's great, but this was a very special experience for me and I'm going to miss it greatly.
Goldman: Jonah, during Season 5, you were also working on Westworld for HBO. Was it tricky to manage at all?
Nolan: It was fine, but it was stressful. Westworld was up on floor three of our building and Person of Interest was on floor two and I'd ride the elevator back and forth a lot. I'd find myself going down to Person of Interest because I enjoyed working on it so much but then I'd be like "I really need to be upstairs." I just liked hanging out because it was like family. So that was a cool experience - two writers rooms, over fifteen different writers working on different projects and bouncing back and forth. But with Person of Interest there was such a shorthand and everyone we worked with we'd been with for at least four years and so by the end it was such a tight-knit group, it was so, so fun dropping into that room. It was effortless breaking with that team.
Plageman: There was another aspect to this final year given the delay in the air schedule and it was that you'd get stopped by people continuously saying "When's your show coming back?" And then they don't know if it's the last season too, so there's a lot of anxiety there because your cast and your crew have questions so you just start sounding like a broken record after awhile, because you just don't have any answers for them. Goldman: It's never as simple as this, but I know a lot of fans wonder how much of this big story you had plotted out from the beginning and how much you made up as you went along. I assume it was a mix of the two so that you could add characters to the show if you liked them in a guest role and so on, but how much did the grand scheme play out like you thought?
Nolan: It's everything I imagined it could be and a whole lot more in terms of making it. In storytelling terms, we covered a lot of territory I wanted to get to, but there's always more. You always want to go further and you're inching the whole time toward something big. And actually, we did a good job of keeping it all sort of in the "five minutes into the future" conversation. The conversation in the beginning was all about the state of surveillance and then that caught up with us a couple years in. And then by the time that happened, the AI conversation came back to the forefront very much with the show. And then you have to consider the events of the last six months with AlphaGo defeating a grand master at chess. We're out of intellectual challenges that we're superior at and that's a heavy, heady moment. And so it was great fun for five years staying just a little bit ahead of the curve and then to inch ever further into the future. But that's okay, we'll take the remaining ideas and put them into other projects. I'm definitely not done with this subject. Whether we're done with these set of characters though remains to be seen.
Plageman: Certainly one of the things we knew we had to reconcile was not only what would happen with Samaritan but also what would be the ultimate fate of the Machine when it came to how we wanted to end the show and I think we did what we wanted to do in that regard.
Matt Fowler: In the finale, the Machine defeated Samaritan, after losing to it trillions of times in a simulated battle. Did she just have it within her all along to pull out the win in the end?
Nolan: I think a part of it was all that relentless training, in a sense. Finch and Root trying to scheme out how this would work but also running these simulations with the Machine in order to figure out how it could win in its most paired down form. So you've got this decommissioned Soviet satellite and these things were up in there in their most compact fighting form. Sort of like how armies used to march out and select one champion to represent them, and the fight would be decided with that champion and the rest of the army would abide by that outcome. But at this point, the armies have been decimated and destroyed and only the champions remain. The sparest algorithmic versions of these ASIs uploaded into the satellite like two strands of DNA having a kung fu battle. So kind of fun, but also kind of hard to visualize.
Plageman: Also, keeping in mind that Finch unleashed this virus that could hobble Samaritan enough to put the two ASIs on more equal footing.
Nolan: Both of them have been reduced to their respective essence, and in that form, the Machine was going to kick Samaritan's ass.Continue on as Nolan and Plageman talk Root, what could have been beyond Samaritan and more on Page 2...
Goldman: Samaritan ended up working as the ultimate foe for the Machine. Did you always see it as the end game and would have held off on this final battle for a couple more seasons if the show were continuing? Because you kind of ended up with the HR era and then the Samaritan era.
Nolan: I had imagined that in any version this would be the final season for Samaritan. And we had a blueprint we used for what could come next. If this was the ultimate big bad - like, what could we do afterward? And we had some pretty cool ideas. But certainly for a final adversary, Samaritan is a pretty great one.
Goldman: As the show went on, it became clear that a number of the week could continue on in a couple of ways - either by something from that storyline spiraling out of it or by that person coming back. Was it interesting for you to work through the stigma of the case of the week thing for some people and how you could wave that into the tapestry of the show?
Plageman: We were having this conversation just recently with Lisa [Joy] and we were trying to decide what makes something serialized versus standalone and what qualifies as mythology and what doesn't. And whether you could write a standalone episode that furthers the character and gives a revelation about them. And Lisa was making the argument of, "Well, isn't that a form of serialized content anyway?" In my mind, not necessarily, and that's the way we wrote every episode of NYPD Blue, so you know I'm a staunch defender of what was once considered standalone television in the network broadcast medium. But I do think there's room for a hybrid of them both and that's what we endeavored to do. I thought creatively it was successful. In terms of the longevity of a show, I'm not so certain. It remains to be seen, since a show like Lost, I guess, whether broadcast is really prepared to promote a serialized show the way it should be.
Nolan: They struggle with it. It's an uneasy fit. The litmus test for us though in terms of "numbers of the week" becoming permanent additions sometime to the show, it wasn't really fan driven because these things are two complicated for that. I mean, over five years you can revisit things that the fans liked as well, but for the most part if we had a good time with someone and we saw more possibilities... We've probably talked to you guys before about Root. Root, we'd talked tremendously about a Catwoman-type character or someone who was sort of morally ambiguous but then we decided to go with a really straight, morally not ambiguous, immoral character. Someone really over the dark side, who was very mysterious. And we hoped to revisit that character. What really propelled us back was when Greg and I were breaking the Season 1 finale and I don't think we intended -- you may remember more than me, Greg -- for Root to be part of that finale. We talked about it. The argument was whether or not we could cram in all the HR stuff and Root and everything else... We ended up re-breaking and re-writing that episode about a week before we shot it. It was a total clusterf**k and a great example of how not to make a TV show, but it wound up being a great episode.
I think Root was always featured in it, but the reason we ended up revisiting Root was because of Ramin [Djawadi]'s music. Ramin had written this theme for Root and it was f**king amazing. It's a really fun, mysterious character, but we really wanted to hear that theme again! So when we came back to the finale again, know we knew where we wanted to go with the character. The show's about the Machine but we didn't lean too hard into the Machine at first. We just wanted to get this all going; let's get the central franchise and the premise and the relationships and get people comfortable with the numbers routine because that was a bit of a hard sell. It's so random. It's the most bizarre premise of a show ever, but it was real, so we knew people could eventually latch onto it and the logic behind it - plus the AI.
We relied on our friend Shane Harris. We met Shane a couple of times over the years and did a panel with him at the Smithsonian. His book, The Watchers, really lays all this s**t out in detail and goes into [John] Poindexter, who is one of the models for Finch. Poindexter, Openheimer, a few others. The first half of the season we were just trying to set that s**t up and then by the end of the season we wanted to lean into the story that we really want to tell as well, which is this emerging AI and how it goes about recruiting people and how does it interact with people and how it slowly starts coming alive. So then we came back to Root and Root was really the one who we plugged into that because of a good piece of music. So sometimes it was a good piece of casting or someone who plugged into a certain place... Paige Turco we really liked working with and and she had great chemistry with Jim [Caviezel]. And really she was the first we put in the show where you go, "Oh, those guys have..." There was a like a zing! It was there on the set and then you would see it in the dailies. I used to think that chemistry - it's a bizarre thing, but you can feel it standing on the set and you go, "Oh s**t!" So you start designing with that [in mind]. But it was great fun, that flexibility. That was one of the great things about shooting the show in New York is the pool of actors there are so deep and so rich too. You have people who do theater and are f**king brilliant and you're in New York and they go, "Yeah, I'll come play for a day!" And they have a good time and they come back. Goldman: So if not for that Root theme, who knows when you would have introduced her physically?
Nolan: Totally different show!
Plageman: Hey, when I heard the Vigilance theme, I went, "We've got to keep writing to those guys!" The Brotherhood theme was really cool too, I thought. I think it was tricky with the show creating different worlds. There was the Municipal threat world, then there's sort of the domestic threat level and then there's AI level. So we tried to do these two, three, four episode arcs and then veer from one into the other, but it became very tricky sometimes to veer from Samaritan to the Brotherhood because you'd wonder, "Do these stakes matter enough?" But you'd realize that's just the mechanics of storytelling and making you care about who's being threatened here and which one of our guys is under the thumb. I think that was something we effectively did. That was something I was proud of. Building out those worlds and those levels of stakes.
Fowler: That was what was so interesting in the Season 4 finale, when Samaritan sort of came crashing into all the worlds - municipal, government, street level.
Nolan: And we'd been waiting for that for a long time too. There was an absolute embargo with the writers on missing your peanut butter with the chocolate. Because we were doing The Wire along with Enemy of the State-slash-Neuromancer. We're doing all of these things, but some of these things don't connect. And that's why Fusco got left out in the cold for so long, because his world doesn't connect with this [other] world. In fact, he'd be completely out in the cold until we've earned it. Elias was the same thing until the point you get the character to where it works. You hold off on the power of those two worlds smashing into each other.
Plageman: My father asks, "What is AI and what does it have to do with me?" And it's like, "Just wait." It permeates everything eventually. The final point of the show is when Greer is telling him, "We've got our hands in everything." Whether it's re-sorting people or distributing food, it's an invisible hand, almost, that you may or may not be aware of, but it definitely affects your life. Continue on as the POI EPs talk complex arcs and more about the show's music...
Fowler: Finch was convinced that Samaritan couldn’t be trusted in the grand scheme of things – that even if you believed in the needs of the many outweigh the few and could excuse the deaths it’s causing now, you step into the future and wonder how that could grow.
Nolan: Yeah, and part of that was who built it and how much control do they have over it. For us, the most compelling characters are the ones that aren’t binary, that aren’t dismissible. It’s not Skynet, in part because we’ve seen Skynet. You need to do more. Look, the first thing Fidel Castro did after he swam ashore in Cuba after being in exile with a handful of guerillas, they fled to the mountains and they started building schools. That’s how you take over. Schools first. It’s insidious on one level, but I think if Samaritan were just herding people into camps it’s not a compelling villain. It’s a compelling villain because it’s offering paradise at a cost and once you make that bargain, you’re never un-making that bargain. You’re never unwinding from that level of control.
Goldman: Did you ever get scared that people tuning into a CBS crime series, that started with mostly standalones, could keep up? Were there talks about how complex things could get?
Plageman: There were some comical moments where you're bouncing back and forth and expecting the audience to follow those threads. They asked us to do something that Jonah and I debated it at first, but then we acquiesced, which was to put the "saga sell" on the show up front, so if you're just encountering the show you could always revert back to that. On a base level you could understand.
Nolan: Well, we talked about it with Peter Roth, the head of Warners TV, who was a huge supporter of the show from the very beginning - and we talked about Quantum Leap, which is where he sold us on it. It was an older show, you know, but they put a saga sell on for Season 2 and the ratings went way up. It was a great example and some of my favorite shows, like Battlestar Galactica, have saga sells on them. Sometimes you just need a little juice for the audience at the beginning.
Plageman: The beauty of it is that it takes a show with a complex premise to begin with and then it distills it down pretty easily, but then we get to let our freak flag fly because that's on the front of the episode. In many ways, perhaps, this was a serialized animal in standalone clothing.
Nolan: Look, my whole career started with a premise that bet on the audience. We made Memento and no one would release it. We had it in the can for a long time. Fool-hearty, brave people financed the film - Newmarket - and they were so frustrated with the industry response to it, as were we, they elected to release it themselves. The response distilled down to this... They'd come watch it and then say, "Yeah, I love it, it's great." "So you're going to buy it?" "No, the audience isn't going get it. I get it but the audience isn't going to get it." And I'd think "What the f**k makes you think you're smarter than the audience?" I met a lot of these people and some of them were very smart, but a lot of them were very stupid. So from that moment on, and with the ultimate release and success of that film, I hitched my wagon to overestimating the audience. The audience was underserved. They were treated like f**king morons by most of what they'd watch. That's not the case anymore. We've seen this explosion of narrative serialized storyline. The Wire was a great example of this. I wasn't a huge Sopranos fan. I liked it and it was a great show, but organized crime, mob stuff was never my cup of tea. With The Wire, I was in, from the first night it aired. I got my brother hooked into it the second season. He didn't have HBO, so I had to tell him to get HBO. And tI remember the second season, HBO did a website for that show with a character glossary. And it was f**king crazy.
Plageman: I always go back to that glossary. It's still up! It's still on there. It's as cool as s**t. Nolan: It feels like a huge sea change ever since I got to Hollywood, since we got that reaction to Memento and, "Ah, the audience are f**king idiots!" You go, "Really? Because I'm part of the audience and I don't think I'm a f**king idiot. I like watching movies like this. I like watching shows like this." And since then, steadily, year by year... I really think cable drama was in direct response to an underserved audience. Broadcast was making some phenomenal TV like ER And NYPD Blue, but there were still people who were a little underserved.
You do often end up in arguments about complexity and good confusion vs. bad confusion. It comes up all the time. But for me, the only thing I've ever known is keep piling that s**t on, because there's going to be someone out there who goes, "Finally, a show that doesn't treat me like I'm an idiot!" And there are a lot of them out there now, so it's good company. In terms of complexity and the layers and all the different groups, occasionally you get to the point where you go, "Okay, if we can't keep everything straight..." Then you periodically do a bloodletting. And that was the end of the HR storyline. It was Carter taking them out, and getting taken out in the process. That that allowed us to pivot into the Samaritan storyline that happened in the very next episode. Yes, a case of the week structure, but you always wanted the sense that there was a looming threat out there and you trust the audience to be able to sort through it. One huge problem with that was that we didn't know we weren't going to be streaming. And when every other show is streaming, it's no longer a fair fight. We had an arm tied behind out back while trying to tell a complicated story, and the only way the audience could catch up was to wait for the box set. It was a slightly old fashioned show [in terms of distribution] in a new world, and that was tricky. You always endeavor to try to make the show as accessible as possible for people, but yeah, by Season 4, there's a lot of s**t that has happened, and if you can't go back and watch it all, it's hard to catch up.
Fowler: I loved many things about the finale, but the scene where Samaritan tried to communicate with Finch through the Times Square screens made me gasp. Because that felt almost fully sci-fi.
Nolan: I directed that scene too - Half of it. Chris Fisher directed all the stuff looking down, that's how I wound up with a cameo. Denise [Thé] is there too but you can only see the corner of her head. Greg was too busy cutting the finale to be there. We have a long tradition of cameoing in finales.
Plageman: That was a breakout public moment, you're right. In the episode prior, when Samaritan tried to make Finch back off after he broke in and was uploading the virus, we wanted it to feel like the Wizard of Oz. Now, Samaritan was looking down on you like a god and telling you to stop. And to have it in such a large public forum like that - like Samaritan's like "Who gives a s**t? I'm coming after you and there's nothing you can do" - its anonymity almost didn't matter to it anymore.
Goldman: We spoke about music earlier, and more than other shows, Person of Interest became notable for the songs it used. Matt mentioned to me how it can be a risky thing that you did very well, since a song can be polarizing and take you out of a moment, while they also can help deeply immerse you. Was that something you knew you wanted to do early on, as far as bringing in songs at key moments?
Plageman: Yeah, you're absolutely right, if the song is wrong or too lyric-heavy that you can't divorce that from the content and narrativem then it becomes a distraction. But I think what we'd do judiciously whenever we'd have an idea for a song is we'd say it has to pass the chill test, first of all. If you don't get goosebumps, we can't use it. Also, I thin a lot of the songs we used, the lyrics were a little more ambiguous so that they can be interpreted in different ways. It was really more about tone. I think maybe because I came from Cold Case, I was used to using music with a show. That felt overdone almost, in a sense, because we would do it every flashback, but here we'd only do it every couple of episodes.
Nolan: We'd usually manage to piss our budget away on stunts or something else. The song was always the last thing we had any say over. To save some money, we rarely used a song. For me, my brother's not a huge fan of using popular music in films - he likes using scores - so I'd just been itching to do it. I love music and Greg and I discovered very early on that we shared a lot in terms of musical taste. We like a lot of the same stuff and had a lot of fun throwing together music mixes on iTunes or Spotify. I had this master list of a 100-150 songs that might play nicely. [producing director] Chris Fisher either sniffed out our musical taste or he shared it to begin because occasionally... He tried to drop Pink Floyd's "Machine" into an episode in Season 2 and we were like, "F**k off, Fish, we got plans for that one." [laughs]
Plageman: See, I thought you wanted that song for the very end.
Nolan: Yeah, I did, but then you know, s**t changes. And then the Bowie song "Heroes" we were talking about for the end a lot. There's a Police song I really wanted to use that didn't quite work. But yeah, we had a lot of fun. You have to be careful with it sometimes because you don't want to overdo it. A lot of shows, especially ones geared toward younger audiences, become musicals, like "Here's a sad song, here's a happy song" and so on. And then in the end, after we'd long planned to end the series on a song, on the Bowie song, and Ramin, who's f**king unbelievable talented -- and I'm now working with on Westworld. He's composing some amazing shit for Westworld -- and who I've been working with since Batman Begins, where he did some instrumentation for that film, he would occasionally come in and we'd have a song picked out and he's have a piece of music... You'd do the Pepsi challenge and go, "Sorry, Ramin's s**t wins again!"
Plageman: But a secret joy for me is I'll go pull up a video on one of the songs [we used on the show] and you'll read a bunch of comments where people say, "Person of Interest sent me here!" You'll realize a new fan appeared for that song, which is cool.
Goldman: The great and bad thing about creating something people care about is you're going to have to put up with guys like us asking, for years and years, "Will there be a follow-up to Person of Interest?" What's your gut feeling? We live in an era with more revivals than ever. Do you think in some form, these characters could ever pop up again?
Nolan: Last year, it was 24, X-Files and Heroes. You'd be forgiven for waking up and checking your TV Guide thinking you'd traveled back in time 10 years. So you never say never. They've got our number! They can call us. We love these f**king characters. We love this world. Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association (TCA). Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/Showrenity.
Eric Goldman is Executive Editor of IGN TV. You can follow him on Twitter at @TheEricGoldman, IGN at ericgoldman-ign and Facebook at Facebook.com/TheEricGoldman.