22 January 2025

Prime Target: a show so preposterous it’s almost addictive

This Apple TV+ thriller is derivative and extremely silly. And yet no producer seemed to think: is this too much?

And so to Darnell College, Cambridge, where the spires are perfectly dreaming, but nothing else is quite right. “Hello, Master!” calls Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall), a postgraduate student of mathematics who looks like a Calvin Klein underwear model, to James Alderman (Stephen Rea), the predictably twitchy and eccentric professor who runs his college. Hmm. Such a nomenclature is surely one no 21st-century person would ever use. He might as well have shouted: “Hello, chief boffin!” or “Hail, our well-read leader!” But then, our hero is supposed to be a genius. Such people, as portrayed on screen, are not permitted to be like the rest of us. They must be rude, arrogant weirdos who struggle to meet the eyes of others and ruin good tablecloths by writing long strings of equations on them.

Prime Target: you’ll see now what writer Steve Thompson (Jericho, Vienna Blood) is doing with his title. Brooks’s passion for prime numbers is about to get him into all sorts of trouble, and not only with Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen) whose white table runner quickly starts to look like the Dead Sea Scrolls when he’s invited over to dinner by her husband, his supervisor Professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey). When Brooks talks excitedly of possible sequences of prime numbers as “God’s cipher… the DNA of existence”, Mallinder is furious. This is “a unicorn”, the stuff of the “tin-foil-hat mob” – a response that sounded, to my ears, fair enough. I have a sister who’s a mathematician, and if she started on about God’s cipher over the spaghetti, I would suggest a little lie-down. But then Mallinder burns the table runner, and you start to wonder what he’s really worried about. On thing’s for sure: it’s not the academic league tables.

Leo Woodall is quite the man of the moment. First there was White Lotus and One Day; soon there’ll be the new Bridget Jones film (he’s the young love interest), and in-between there’s this: a show so preposterous it’s kind of addictive. Lavin, for instance, is an archaeologist who believes she has found, uncovered by a gas explosion in Baghdad, the famed House of Wisdom built during the Abbasid period by the Caliph, Harun al-Rashid.

“Yes, the greatest library ever created,” she says to her departmental colleague, as you do (even clever people need things explaining sometimes). I think we can all agree this is quite the coup. But when Brooks looks at its dome, it gets even better. He sees a pattern there, a sequence he now scrawls on her runner. Yes. It’s as if a female Indiana Jones bumped into a young Alan Turing, and no producer thought: “Is this too much?”

Questions arise, like the smoke from Prof Mallinder’s garden brazier. How come all this at-home-with-the-Einsteins activity is captured on film by the US National Security Agency? Why is the NSA so interested in university mathematicians, and how did it smuggle its cameras into their Cambridge studies? Who on Earth deciphers the algebra it somehow photographs, hieroglyphics scribbled on blackboards as well as tablecloths? In Cassis in the south of France, a group of good-looking young American agents hunch over laptops. I’ve no idea why their surveillance operation is based there rather than in, say, Maryland. Is it to do with the weather? The croissants? What?

It’s fascinating, in the age of streaming, to consider quality control. I doubt that Severance, the excellent Apple TV+ show I wrote about recently, would have been made by a terrestrial channel, even in the days when they had money to splash – and for all the wrong reasons (too challenging, too singular, too expensive). But nor would this have been made, either, and for all the right reasons (too silly, too derivative, too expensive). How they throw ideas at the wall to see – splat! – what sticks! I said earlier that Prime Target is addictive, but I don’t think it will stick, ultimately.

Even as a curiosity, it’s also instantly forgettable – and the terrestrial channels still do some things better, even now. For all its international pizzazz, it’s not half as good or as enjoyable as Ludwig, another Cambridge-set series about a brainy loner.