I don't recall any innocents getting killed on Person of Interest. At least not by Reese. I like the show. Not really seeing any mangst, myself; neither of those characters are looking for any sympathy. They both basically see themselves as already dead. No woobies there, thank goodness.

Not really seeing any mangst

"I let 9/11 happen because I was so wrapped up in myself...I must sacrifice all happiness to save one person at a time forever more..."

"My girlfriend died when I was saving lives halfway across the universe so I became a homeless man with the world's worst beard, woe is me, no one understands my pain..."

Ugh, I find it quite gross. I watched the requisite three eps and I'm out. The acting is too melodramatic for me, not convincing nor charismatic.

I watched the first few episodes, mostly because there was nothing else on. Then Bones started and I'm giving it a pass. (However, I still admire Jim Caveziel's cheekbones.)

I don't recall any innocents getting killed on Person of Interest. At least not by Reese.

Not killed by the heroes, just incidentally dead but not mattering because their social security numbers were not picked by the machine - people in the same situation as the person they were going all out to save.

I see POI as "The Equalizer" for the '10s.

I was not watching closely, but I just could not get the premise when I saw the pilot. Numbers come up because huh? And you know someone's involved in something bad(as victim or otherwise) because random number generator huh?

The premise seems to be that Mr. Finch built a massive surveillance system for the government. The government is only interested in terrorist activities, not in random people being involved - as victim or perpetrator - in day-to-day crimes. So he, as creator of the system with access to the information, has it spit out the SS numbers of those who will be involved.

But how does it know from the SS numbers who will be involved in crimes?

It sees all, knows all. Perhaps there's a lot of handwavium involved.

Finch wrote a program that predicts crimes. It makes two lists--relevant (big, terrorist) incidents and non-relevant (small, one person harmed) incidents. Finch made the system for his bosses, but he left himself a backdoor to the small incident list, since he knew they wouldn't pay attention to it. But it has to be a small backdoor, so they don't catch him. So all it tells him is the SSN of the person involved, and not whether they're victim or antagonist.