I’ll admit I was initially drawn toWisdom of the Crowd by the fact it features Entourage favorite Jeremy Piven. But after watching the pilot, which aired last Sunday on CBS, Piven is not the only element that makes this show a worthwhile consideration in the increasingly crowded Fall Sunday television line-up. These elements include: timely questions of privacy, policing, vigilantism, and technology in a modern information society.
The show is based on an interesting yet reasonable premise, namely that crowd-sourcing crime investigations will, ultimately prove more effective than the traditional police-based examination. To be sure, just as technology has disrupted numerous aspects of life, this show argues that it's only a matter of time before modern technology generally, and social media specifically, sends policing the way of the dodo, VCR, and floppy disks.
Piven stars as technology entrepreneur and billionaire Jeffrey Tanner who at the height of his career, decides to step down from running his multi-million-dollar tech company to focus on his new start-up. The start-up is working on a social media aggregating computer application named SOPHE, which uses crowd-sourced information to solve crimes. Tanner comes to this decision after the murder of his daughter. While the murderer was ultimately arrested, convicted, and sent to prison; Tanner believes the authorities either deliberately or mistakenly got the wrong person. Like many real-life tech entrepreneurs, Tanner comes to the belief that technology could have done the job better and so decides to develop SOPHE to not only resolve the murder of his daughter, once and for all, but also help other people frustrated by a police system unable or unwilling to fulfill its primary responsibility to “protect and serve” the community.
Understanding that he cannot do it all by himself, Tanner assembles a team of like-minded professionals who each bring their own unique skill-set to help SOPHE achieve full effectiveness. The team includes Natalia Tena as head engineer Sara Morton, Blake Lee as chief programmer Josh, Jake Matthews as resident hacker Tariq, and Monica Potter as Tanner’s ex-wife Alex Hale. Tanner is also assisted by Richard T. Jones as San Francisco Police Detective Tommy Cavanaugh. Cavanaugh was originally assigned to the investigation of Tanner’s daughter but was pulled of the team after he voiced his doubts about the investigation and its focus on the person eventually convicted for the murder. In this sense, Cavanaugh plays both a Tanner supporter, in questioning whether the police got the right guy, and a Tanner skeptic in that he believes only old-fashioned police work can solve crimes.
As a television series, Wisdom of the Crowd has everything, from bankable stars to interesting plot-lines to a favorable time slot; to be a hit series with a long future. Moreover, the intersection of technology, and privatized criminal justice offers a wealth of content to mine for stories. There also seems to be good chemistry between the characters. The only issue is how the creators and stars decide to develop such fertile ground. As we have seen with other shows with similar background stories, such as Person of Interest, it could go either way. What do you think?
Written by lao.san on Oct 3, 2017
I like it, so far it's awesome. Inteligente and just enough comedy, to take the edge of the serious topics it gives answers and asks questions too. Really hope it last longer then some similary interesting and exaiting TV Series #fingerscrossed...
The idea is interesting to me but should be approached with much work and caution. After all as we saw with that one poor guy getting the snot beat out of him simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We don't need vigilantes and those that do follow along with this type of technology should be made aware, and laws written that if they DO more than simply observe and report that they will be prosecuted for whatever violations they commit in the process of civilian policing.
Yes, our public is not happy in general with the way the police departments are run. But are they really offering any real working solutions or do they just want to complain? No, I'm not with any law enforcement organization. I do however see the both sides. With our metro area, one city alone is having to cut their force by over 25% in a time when homicide, burglary and so forth are going through the roof. The public is outraged over this, but there is no funds to pay for these men and women to "protect and serve." The public needs to understand that this service is not free and it is certainly not cheap. So either pay up or shut up.
I think technology can go a long way with helping law enforcement, but it needs to work for it, not against it. Only time will tell, and the laws need to keep pace with the ever changing world of technology so that innocent victims are not caught in the net of civilian policing vs actually catching those that break the laws.
It will be interesting to see where they go with this series.
I agree this show has a reasonable premise about solving crime, as opposed to other recent shows' attempt at using modern technology that was just silly (APB, Intelligence).