AUGH, I hate the mangst born out of dead girlfriend / wife /mother cliche. Occasionally it's a dead father (H50) or son (Leverage) but most often it's some dead woman/girl solely existing to pad the manly hero's angst fodder and we hatesssss it! We hatesssss it so much! Of course in real life, the loss of a loved one is painful beyond imagining, but in fiction, especially in TV land, the whole trope is used with a laughable amount of abandon and is just a lazy shorthand in storytelling, IMO.

Handwavium ... would there be any TV without it?

he is more of a whiner if she is not dead

Yeah, that precisely.

Fridging is it's own problem, but if he's wandering around feeling sorry for himself because SHE CHOSE SOMEONE ELSE he seriously needs to get over himself. Move on, chuckles, move on.

which makes no attempt whatsoever to explain how people find the team

Hardison finds them, or it's a friend of a friend situation. They have made the attempt. You missed it, that's all.

just a lazy shorthand in storytelling, IMO

Yuppity yup yup.

There are more interesting and creative ways of giving your hero/heroine angst aside from fridging. Like Charlie Crews being incarcerated for 12 years for murders he did not commit. Reese's substance abuse problem (MAN, I miss Life.) Olivia Dunham has a dead mother in this universe and a dead sister in the other one, but she never lets that define her. The complexities of what drives Raylan Givens in Justified. SARAH freakin' CONNOR.

I love an interestingly handled substance abuse problem. I know some people don't like that in/about Leverage, but I adore it. Much more than the dead son.

And don't get me started about Dean Winchester's substance abuse. Fucking adore. I just worry they're going to fix him this season. I like him broken.

I like it when Reid makes subtle references to his substance abuse on CM (although this season's throwing it at JJ after Prentiss's return was not subtle and I didn't care for that reference as much).

They do a good job with giving him angst without making it all about a woman. Well, actually, it is mostly about a woman, just his mom instead of a love interest.

I have a theory that procedurals should be about 5% personal lives of the good guys and 95% stuff that moves the story forward. I miss the best days of Law & Order, when admissibility of evidence was often a plot point and the good guys sometimes lost.

While the people killed in Person of Interest may be the bad guys, it's still vigilantism, and sometimes based on rather thin evidence.

when admissibility of evidence was often a plot point and the good guys sometimes lost.

Now that would be interesting.

I think we've gone through a long period of cops going outside the boundaries of the law because they KNOW the guy's guilty even though they can't prove it legally. So they're all righteous because the guy's guilty, guilty, guilty. But there's little consideration of what if the guy's not guilty or of the collateral damage done along the way.

Ginger,

POI doesn't start with the premise of people killing folks. I am pretty sure no one gets dead on the show unless they try to kill Linus or Jesus or the person either one is protecting.

They don't aim to kill people. They don't exactly bring in law enforcement in a timely fashion either, but I don't think of them as murderers.