It's been a big week for the creators and fans of CBS' Person of Interest. Not only did the show enter its first ever syndicated run on WGN America, but the first three seasons were finally released on Netflix - with the fourth arriving on Netflix in just a few weeks, on September 22nd. "The show all about network intelligence is finally on the internet," creator Jonathan Nolan remarked. Fans can now more easily revisit old episodes and - more importantly, perhaps - new eyes can find the show. Hopefully enough to give POI a boost when it returns in 2016 with a 13-episode Season 5.

Person of Interest to "Drop the Mic" with Season 5

Many Happy Returns

Firewall

Bad Code

To celebrate Person of Interest making its way to Netflix, I spoke to Nolan and executive producer/showrunner Greg Plageman about their favorite episodes. Yes, I know: I made them choose but a few from a list of close to 100 worthy episodes. "We love all our children equally," Plageman said of the process, echoing Nolan's sentiment that picking out favorite episodes was like picking your favorite kid. "It was truly painful," Nolan added.But here we are. Seven episodes from the show's history (plus one unaired episode), along with Nolan and Plageman's insight into them. A really awesome list for fans of the show, and, for those just checking out the show for the first time, a list you'll want to circle back to when you're done binge-watching.I found "Many Happy Returns" to be a tremendously emotional and moving episode. And it really gave us, with those flashbacks, an insight into one of the the first interactions between Finch and Reese. It was really cool and really well done and I still love that Danger Mouse song with the Flaming Lips. That episode is something that has continued to inform Reese's character. Because he's still searching along to try and make that type of connection again in his life. In the first moments of the pilot, you hear him say "When that someone is taken away from, you what do you become then?" It was a line that Jonah wrote that really resonated. And here it came back around. We understood how Reese became the man we knew.The funny thing about "Many Happy Returns" was, I didn't know s**t about TV. So when we put the pilot together, half the material from "Many Happy Returns" was actually in the original pilot script. [laughs] At that point in my career, I had only written movies so I just thought I'd put it all in there. And Greg read the pilot script and was like "This is great, man, but it's also like four hours of TV." I figured, we'll go shoot it and then we'll cut something together. So then Greg and I wound up in the edit suite with an 80-minute pilot trying to figure out what the f**k we were going to put in there. So we actually shot a version of the flashbacks for "Many Happy Returns" for the pilot. So when the episode rolled around, it was a great opportunity to reshoot them now knowing more about the characters. We didn't really rewrite them but we sort of nudged them in different directions. Erik Mountain wrote the episode and he's one of our superheroes over here."Our thing with Person of Interest from the beginning was, we wanted to have that layered richness. The ability to explore characters not just going forward but also going backwards. Which is something that we loved about things like Lost and other shows that used that technique. But we also didn't want to string mysteries out forever. Because there's always more to learn about Reese. There's definitely more to learn about Finch. We'll actually be learning more about them [in Season 5]. The pilot sort of began with a flashback and then dumped you into the present. And flashbacks are something I always loved exploring on film and something that Greg, with Cold Case, used as a language for that show. The ability to step backwards and forwards. The pre-history of how something got so f**ked up in the first place. It's an incredibly powerful storytelling tool. And I don't think we've ever done anything that the audience weren't all over. The audience is very very smart. They watch a lot of TV. A lot of movies. They have seen it all before. And they can hang with an aggressively non-linear structure. And with Person of Interest almost being told from the perspective of the Machine, there's sort of a mechanical treatment of time.Root is one of my very favorite characters that I've ever had a chance to write for. Amy Acker is an incredible person to work with and an amazing actor. But also, the character itself, which started out as this faceless, nameless apparition in another Erik Mountain episode earlier in Season 1. We always knew we wanted to circle back to that character. We set up a lot of characters and she was one we were excited about returning to. We also wanted to go back to Root because we'd composed this cue for her, a piece of music, we thought was so engaging. And we loved the idea of someone - like shades of Mr. Robot which is a show we both currently love - shades of this idea that in the new world someone who you could look at and never in a million years think was dangerous could have the ability to manipulate these network systems. There are people who are literal superheroes now because they can hack into a car and control it. Or a plane. And we were looking for a femme fatale. Someone very active, very surprising and with a real misanthropic streak. And with "Firewall," it was one of my greatest experiences working on anything ever.The first season was so insane. We were shooting 23 of these things. We did the pilot and we hadn't taken a vacation so we were on, like, eighteen months straight of just doing this show. We were at the finale and we knew there were so many things we wanted to play with. We wanted to include HR, our guys, we wanted to turn the narrative inside out so that someone finally noticed the machine. Something beyond the episode before it, that David Slack wrote for us, featuring that NSA style operative Peck (Jacob Pitts) who noticed the Machine. But we wanted someone to stumble across the Machine who had malicious intent. Not just someone who was appalled at it. Someone who was like "this is everything I've been waiting for." So we were two weeks out from shooting the finale for Season 1 and we totally re-broke it to include Root's character. It was a total Hail Mary. Greg and I along without amazing writing staff said "f**k it" and pulled all these elements together and catalyzed it into the introduction of a Moriarty-like character."My wife actually had been the one to suggest Amy for the role of Root. She'd been a huge fan of Angel, as I had been, and was a huge fan of Amy's. And she suggested Amy because she can be so slippery. She's seemingly innocent, but then there's all this depth there as an actor. Anyone who watched Amy on Angel remembers her spectacular transformation on that show. And so we just thought, here's this amazing actor so let's center this story, which continued on into the beginning of Season 2, around this character who finally noticed these two guys and the Machine, and then manipulated that and their system to get close to them. To me, the Season 1 finale and this first Root story was like planting our flag. Telling people "this is what this show can do." It was just thrilling for me. It was an amazing collaborative effort on all fronts.

More of Nolan and Plageman's favorite episodes - including one we haven't seen yet! - on Page 2...