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TV Series: Numb3rs
CBS, Friday, 10 PM
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
The landscape of television drama is so heavily laden with CSI franchise and wannabe shows you're just out of luck if that's not your bag. Those programs look amazing, but for many of us there's something very wrong with the cookie-cutter one-liners that flow from the mouths of the characters. It's enough to put you off cop shows for good.
It would have been easy to miss Numb3rs all together and not give it a second thought if it hadn't been for the preview shown at half time of an NFL playoff game in January. It was obvious from that short clip this wasn't going to be the same old same old. CBS cleverly ran the debut immediately following the football game, guaranteeing a large audience of people who, like me, were just curious to see what a cop show about math might be like.
That's right, a cop show about mathematics. Hence the show's title: Numb3rs.
Don Epps is an FBI agent who has drawn the rare assignment of working in the agency office in his home town. While Don's working on a serial rapist case, his brother Charlie, who happens to be a world-class math genius, becomes interested in what big brother is doing and offers his assistance. What can Charlie do? Plenty, as it turns out, and that becomes the premise for the series, as Charlie offers the first of many fascinating explanations of how numbers can help Don solve the case. Using the example of a sprinkler and the drops of water it distributes, Charlie explains that although it's impossible to predict exactly where the next drop will land, examination of data on where previous drops have landed can lead you to the sprinkler even if you didn't know where it actually was. Same with the rapist, only the drops of water are the crime scenes. Charlie does some fast and furious figurin' on white boards, prints out a map showing the crime scenes and the "hot zone" where he believes the rapist resides, and the show is off and running.
If they stopped right there, it would become a colossal bore very quickly, but the writers have given these characters some depth. Personal lives can be examined without the results falling right off the cliff and into the soap opera cesspool. Yes, there is drama, but it's drama that means something. Drama that works. It's drama that explains why Don (Rob Morrow) and agent Terry Lake (Sabrina Lloyd) work so well together, and why Charlie (David Krumholtz) is so sensitive and so easily sent into hibernation in his solarium, where he works on impossible math problems to avoid facing reality. It explains why their dad, Alan (Judd Hirsch) is reluctantly dipping his toe back into the dating pool after nearly forty years.
But it doesn't dwell on these things. First and foremost, it's a show about solving crimes through applied mathematics, something that is actually done in the police world -- in fact most of the stories on Numb3rs are from real cases -- and until now has received no attention, possibly because most writers couldn't get past the uncomfortable image of a confrontation ending in "Stop, or I'll calculate Pi to 20,000 digits!" On Numb3rs they avoid that geeky scene entirely by letting brother Don do the classic FBI stuff we've come to expect from our TV agents, like running sideways with his gun drawn, yelling "FACE DOWN ON THE FLOOR" to hapless criminals cut down in the prime of crime by the Sultan of the Slide Rule, who is safely back in his solarium calculating something else. Oh, so many chances for it to go wrong, and yet it never does. When Agent Epps runs sideways and takes down the bad guy, we're holding our breath because they've made the whole thing completely intense. So far there's no typical Hollywood silliness with Sabrina Lloyd's character, who never falls into traps and has to be rescued. She's as able as any male agent in the joint.
The tension is often strung very tightly during the Numb3rs hour, so little breaks from that tension are built in via Dr. Larry Fleinhardt, a fellow professor at the college where Charlie somehow finds time to teach once in a while. Dr. Fleinhardt, played by Peter MacNicol (of Ally McBeal fame), is brilliant and flaky as can be. The conversations between Charlie and Dr. Fleinhardt are always at least odd, if not totally bizarre, but it's often during these moments of light humor that the 2000 watt bulb goes on over Charlie's head and the case is solved. Then it's back to the FBI office to explain it in terms the non-mathies can grasp.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Numb3rs is this presentation ritual between Charlie and the other agents, because he uses examples to make it easier to understand, yet he's still flying through squigglies on a white board at mach speed. Being a math idiot myself, I have no idea if there's any validity to anything being said on the screen during these scenes, but they're succeeding in creating an illusion, because for those few minutes I feel like I get it. My guess is I don't actually get it, but the case makes sense at the very least, and the whole process seems thoroughly fascinating. The show has been picked up for another season by CBS, and the writers claim to have the outlines for upwards of another seventy scripts, so this could go on for a long time. It scored well with viewers, so it may just be around for a while, and while it's here should raise the bar for cop dramas.
© 2005 - DJ Johnson