Ah, Numbers. Excuse me, Numb3rs. Were they aiming this for me? The veteran leads of Northern Exposure and Taxi, plus the ever-so-cute Sabrina Lloyd of Sports Night and Ally McBeal/Chicago Hope‘s Peter MacNicol, in a math-themed show shot in part on the CalTech campus where I used to hang? Couldn’t be a coincidence.
And yet, the results are a mixed bag. Oh, if you’ve heard me talk about David Krumholtz’s performance in an unaired Judd Apatow pilot, you might think I’d find fault with him here. Nope. He’s spot on, he was just wrong for that other role. And they do a good job of finding the right situations to apply math to, and find ways of speaking about it that folks should be able to follow, and that doesn’t seem bogus (in contrast to, say, every single “enhance that low-res photo to 100 times as much detail” scene we see in crime shows these days.)
But the math gets sloppy later on (basically, in trying to find what’s generating a bunch of points, they switch from trying to find one focus to trying to find two foci — but in the second calculation, somehow one of the seemingly even-weighted foci ends up at the same point as when there was merely one, which means that the second focus exerted no power.) And that lovely Sabrina Lloyd is being used in a role where she has no chance to show her powerful spark. And frankly, I think they’ll have a hard time keeping from being repetitious — although “repetitious” actually seems to be the goal in the current procedural-laden world.
Worth checking out. Not worth committing to, yet.
