For the past four seasons, CBS’ Person Of Interest has made an action-packed and surprisingly thoughtful series out of the question, “What if humanity created an artificial intelligence capable of preventing crime?” From that initial technology-hewing version of Minority Report, Jonathan Nolan (brother of director Christopher Nolan, who cowrote many of his sibling’s films, including The Dark Knight) and Greg Plageman have developed a complex and compelling story about the human cost of scientific evolution. The A.V. Club spoke with the two executive producers of the series as it enters its final year this week, with a shortened season and a schedule of twice-a-week episodes airing on CBS. Nolan and Plageman held court on their favorite character pairings, how to smuggle human relationships into a computer, and the belief that nobody thinks they’re working for an evil company—even Facebook employees...

AVC: Do you think that if we had been watching the team behind Samaritan from the beginning, rather than the team behind The Machine, that we would be pro-Samaritan?

JN: I think that’s one of the delicious things about what we’ve been doing with this storyline and where we’ve gone with it in this last season. I’m always most excited about and drawn to villains who have a point of view and have a plan. One of the most exciting things about The Joker in The Dark Knight is, he may be a villain in your eyes, but he’s the only person who hasn’t broken his own rules. Everyone else has, everyone else has corrupted themselves, but he’s in many ways one of the most ethical people in the film in terms of their own ideas. He had an idea, and it drives the story forward. We applied a similar approach here, but even more rationally. A lot of things that Samaritan espouses are believed by the people who work for Samaritan, the same way that I’m sure people who work for Facebook don’t believe that they’re working for the company that will destroy the world. But, you know, they are. And everyone gets through the day rationalizing their own existence...

https://tv.avclub.com/the-exec-producers-of-person-of-interest-suspect-facebo-1798246907