winopaul

Modern production sensibilities must mean it is OK for actors to mumble now. You won't have Tina Fey enunciating "cam-er-a" or "rural juror". Almost every character said something I missed. The closed captions were screwed up, coming 5 seconds late, and one word at a time. This meant when checking for what the actor said, you miss what is being said at the time.

Miraculously, 39 minutes in, during the Allstate commercial, the captions corrected. They came at the perfect time, and appeared as whole sentences, which is much easier to read, as opposed to single words scrolling onto a sentence.

I assume there is some AI evil going on, where the captions are late and single-word, until the algorithm has enough show buffered so it can present the caption properly.

I also noted the old guy had yellow teeth. This was refreshing. It used to really bug me watching Westerns where it looked like everybody just came from the orthodontist. Maybe the networks will go full British teeth in a few years.

It was nice that the women were not Hollywood airhead fluff-babes. They certainly were not whupped with the ugly stick either, but at least they didn't all look like JonBenét Ramsey.

The plot was nice, semi-Hitchcock, semi-Columbo. They did not reveal the criminal right away, but rather, half-way through. Nice touch, and nice ending, a little twist, but not full-evil sociopath Shyamalan twist. Also, no Law and Order Criminal Intent opening, with 12 different things happening that make zero sense.

I dislike the male lead. TV newscasters don't have beards since people have trouble trusting guys that hide behind a beard. They sure don't mumble. How evasive can you get? The female lead is nice, I might watch again for her and the other cops in the station.

Acting and production values are what you would expect from A-list network TV. I wonder if they shot it in British Columbia so they could use the Vancouver talent pool. If this was a non-union shoot, I am a little disappointed- I guess the strikes made a lot of producers mad.

OK, back to binging Bosch, that is a pretty good show too.

I saw Michael Emerson on a 2002 Law and Order Criminal Intent episode (S01E16). That reminded me of Person of Interest. I was delighted to see it is free with ads on amazon's Freevee. With this and NYPD Blue free on Tubi, my quality of life has improved significantly. I remember the finale for Person of Interest and it was really touching and thought-provoking. I will binge it the next few weeks and hope to reminded how good it was. The only bad thing about it is the formulaic including of gun play in every episode. Oh well, a little drama porn won't kill me. Be sure to give this show a chance. It's nice entertainment.