So today my wife and I watched Person of Interest and Ringer. If you'd asked me beforehand which show I thought might have been better, I would have guessed Person of Interest, but I would have been completely wrong.

Good Lord, that show had a terrible pilot. It was just awful. The writing was stilted and cliched. It seemed like the CBS execs were breathing down the writers' necks, telling them "okay, make sure you always explain in simple detail exactly what's going on so our 90 year old viewers can follow it." There was just cliche after cliche, and the acting didn't help matters. Jim Caviezel was surprisingly bad, delivering all his lines under his breath. The only redeeming aspect of the entire show is Micheal Emerson. His dialog was just as terrible as everyone else's, but I'll be damned if that man isn't a lot of fun to watch on screen.

But sadly, even Ben Linus couldn't save this show. I will be giving it two more episodes, and my wife has already gone into "tell me if it gets better" mode, meaning she's probably done with it.

Oh, and I forgot to mention my disappointment that they explain away the method for how they get the information for who's in danger.
Click to reveal..
I was both disappointed that they gave it away in the first episode, and that the explanation wasn't supernatural in origin, as I had come to expect from what I'd heard of the show. Instead, apparently they get their intel from a computer the government uses to spy on everyone in an attempt to stop terrorist attacks. Because this machine is secret they can't intercede in "minor" issues like premeditated murders (though I don't see why not), so Micheal Emerson's character hires this guy to help with these smaller cases. Boring.



On the other hand, Ringer has some interesting stuff going on for it. It's not the best show I've seen but it was good enough to stick with (for me, at least, YMMV). There were some definite issues with direction, editing, and pacing, but the acting seemed to hold up and the writing/dialog was acceptable. The primary issue I had was that pacing issue I mentioned. There's a scene early on with the two sisters that had me going "wait, why are they on a boat now? Why is one of them waking up now, when I never saw her go to sleep? Why is she already in her sister's place? Did I miss a minute or two from every scene?" They would just cut to whatever they wanted to go to next with little to no transition. It ended up with a very weird feel, one of those slightly intangible elements that you need to make a show feel like the people behind it really know what they're doing.

But still, I liked it. Perhaps the bar had been set low for the day after Person of Interest, or perhaps it's just seeing SMG on TV again, but I liked Ringer.
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Matt