• Network: NBC
  • Series Premiere Date: Jun 7, 2010
  • Season #: 1
Persons Unknown Image
Metascore

Mixed or average reviews - based on 12 Critics What's this?

User Score

Generally favorable reviews- based on 66 Ratings

  • Summary: Seven strangers are kidnapped and find themselves in a strange and empty town.
  • Genre(s): Drama, Horror, Suspense
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 12
  2. Negative: 4 out of 12
  1. Reviewed by: Keith Staskiewicz
    83
    Creator Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects) is no stranger to pretzel-twist plots and out-of-the-left-field surprises, and his new series, about a gaggle of strangers, abducted and abandoned in a CCTV-monitored ghost town, promises both in spades.
  2. For now, "Persons" is delightfully weird and foreboding.
  3. 50
    The premiere is heavy on set-up and light on action. It's more about mood than plot. Whether that will hold up over 13 hours is questionable.
  4. Reviewed by: Peter Swanson
    38
    The real problem with the pilot is not with the situation, it's with the people placed in it. Not only are none of the seven characters particularly interesting, they simply fail to react realistically to their bizarre circumstances.

See all 12 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5 out of 11
  2. Negative: 4 out of 11
  1. Hi, i have watched many series but i find this persons unknown series interesting due to how the mind works when someone is abducted. i really enjoyed it cause if this is to happen in real life how will someone react. As how janet cooper would do anything to go back to her daughter. Well i guess thats how i will react if i want to get out in the situation. Further more all the characters played are good and each has an individual weired background. The ending should have been more dramatic and there should have been two survivors. Well i m looking forward to see the season 2 and hope to watch it soon and cant wait to see what is the level 2 .Well being in malaysia i have to watch it through internet . Expand
  2. 10
    Very very successful mini series. Specially it was great final episodes. Persons Unknown resemble Lost and Saw. Really awesome series. Playfulness, fiction... everything wonderful. Collapse
  3. 5
    I really had some high hopes for this series. I liked the season premiere felt this would be another Lost but a little more twisted. Instead i feel so detached from all the characters who are either trying to act really hard or just don't have any skill to bring their character to life or, dare i say it, the writers have lost the plot. Granted, I haven't finished the season yet ( i have another 3 episodes to go), but if things don't improve I wouldn't miss it if got cancelled.
    Being directed by Jonathan Frakes, i'm hoping this doesn't get all convoluted the way Dollhouse did.
    Expand
  4. Halfway through the first episode I realized exactly what this show was about -- creating suspense and tension in a fictional vacuum of impossibility. It is an attempted summer-time diversion from the tedium of reruns and second-string programming -- and a failure, at that. It is exactly what it attempts to supercede. However, despite the aggravation of it's twisty-turny, tongue-in-cheek writing style which is designed to lead the viewer via a nose-ring into a smugly concrete wall, there are a few shining points. When the vehicle is obscured, genuine moments of humanity are revealed. Certain interactions between the characters are charismatically empathic and succeed in the goal of alleviating moments of summer boredom. The greater setting of the town is a laughably unrealistic anachronism from the days of the twilight zone, or possibly the x-files, yet the cozy pedestrian environment of the hotel, bar and barbershop are where you will find your disbelief suspended. Worth a watch on a languid summer eve? Perhaps. Do the writers deserve raining blow after blow to their genitals for their unabashed smugness? To be frank, that is the only question I would tune in for a second season to see answered. Expand

See all 11 User Reviews