When it comes to television, the HBO drama The Sopranos is the Secretariat of quality programming. In addition to being the ninth Triple Crown winner in 1973, the thoroughbred sired a number of major stakes champions and his successful bloodline extended into second and third generations. The Sopranos also racked up its fair share of Golden Globe and Emmy nominations during its six season run, but the later creations by television writers who spent their tutelage under David Chase are equally impressive. Matthew Weiner, for instance, crafted the 1960s drama Mad Men and in essence raised the reputation of cable channel AMC from the home of reruns to the new HBO. In 2010, meanwhile, the original HBO tapped into The Sopranos pedigree with the Terence Winter created Boardwalk Empire and found its own championship racehorse in the process.

In many ways Boardwalk Empire is an amalgamation of The Sopranos and Mad Men. The former followed mafia kingpin Tony Soprano as he dealt with the trials and tribulations of both his domestic and professional lives. Boardwalk Empire likewise utilizes organized crime as its primary focus but Terence Winter populated his drama with such real life figures as Al Capone, Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Arnold Rothstein. Mad Men, meanwhile, uses the advertising industry of the 1960s as a way to explore the changes that occurred during that decade, changes that ultimately shaped the present day world of the Twenty First Century. Boardwalk Empire in turn takes place in the 1920s, with a focus on Atlantic City as representative of an earlier period of cultural change within the nation.

“You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people. People like you. Crimes the government considered ‘irrelevant.’ They wouldn’t act so I decided I would. But I needed a partner. Someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us but victim or perpetrator, if you’re number’s up, we’ll find you.”

Thus begins the CBS drama Person of Interest, in which a billionaire computer genius and former government operative team up to prevent crimes before they take place. The information they use in their operation is secretly intercepted from a NSA spying device that not only gathers data but has been “trained” to interpret the millions of phone calls and e-mails at its disposal to detect patterns of criminal activity. While such a concept may initially appear as “science fiction,” the reality of life in the modern day world suggests that it is actually more fact than one might imagine.