Person Of Interest

... is the breakout hit of the US TV year, apparently. From JJ Abrams’s production company, with Jonathan Nolan on pilot duty.

And it’s... apparently very straightforward. Apparently.

Creator of system to track major threats by all electronics to public safety decides to deal with minor threats (to one person per episode) which the government overlooks because they want it to track major ones, so he recruits an ex-superspy to be his Equalizer by proxy.

Could get much more involved as it goes on - it already has flashbacks to our hero’s tragic past, and advertising here points out how scary the constant monitoring is, even as the heroes apparently use it just for good - but it could also stay as POI-of-the-week more often than not.

Is it gameable?

Sure. Recruit a small team of experts rather than a single agent. The only hard part is making the POI-of-the-week and their life complex enough to sustain a session. Multiple reasons they’re in danger, or someone close to them is, including a red herring or two. Locations for the PCs to surveil, people for the POI to meet with. Throw in complications from the PCs’ lives and their director’s agenda, and add headbutts and leg shots to taste. Plenty of suitable action-hero systems are available.

More generally, “mysterious source sends you to look into a problem without quite enough information” could describe... oh, about a fifth of all RPG adventures?

In this case, there’s basically no information at all, even less than Angel Investigations had to go on with short headache-inducing visions. So it would make for a very investigation-heavy game due to the initial near total blank.