We’ve been doing Stream It Or Skip It for over seven years, and in that time, we’ve rarely seen a first episode of a show that doesn’t give us enough story to figure out whether we want to watch more or not. It’s the whole purpose of this column. We sample a show like any viewer would, by watching the first episode and figuring out if it’s worth watching more. But in the case of a new Apple TV+ thriller, we just don’t know what to think after its first episode.
Opening Shot: Through the frame of an awning, we see a drone flying. “Bagdhad, Iraq.”
The Gist: A mom takes her daughter to an ice cream parlor. When she realizes that she doesn’t have enough cash, she goes to the ATM next door, and leaves the girl with the owner of the parlor, whom she knows. Then, there’s a huge explosion. As the woman tries to get her daughter out of the rubble, the ground collapses. The camera pans underneath and shows a temple or some sort of chamber.
In Cambridge, England, we meet Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall), a graduate student in math who is one of the brightest math students to come through the university in decades. He’s having a conflict with his current faculty advisor, Prof. Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey); he just doesn’t trust him as much as he did his old mentor, Prof. Raymond Osbourne (Joseph Mydell), who had to retire due to Alzheimer’s. Brooks sees the world in numbers, often writing in a notebook he carries with him. He also gets tunnel vision, as we see after he meets and sleeps with a local bartender, Adam Mellor (Fra Fee).
In the meantime, Mallinder’s wife, anthropology professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen), has gotten a call about a chamber found below a street in Bagdhad after a gas explosion, and is being invited to examine it in person.
When Mallinder and Lavin invite Edward over for dinner, he looks at the photos of the chamber and sees a numeric pattern in the inscriptions. Later, he tells Mallinder what he’s working on. “What if God’s cipher, here on earth, the DNA of existence, is actually prime numbers?” Mallinder dismisses Edward’s theories, but what Edward doesn’t realize is that Mallinder has worked on a prime number theory in the past, to the point where he’s being watched.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Prime Target feels a bit like A Beautiful Mind or Good Will Hunting crossed with The Da Vinci Code.
Our Take: There’s potential in the first episode of Prime Target, created by Steve Thompson (Leonardo). It’s obvious that this conspiracy behind the suppression of a project like Edward’s prime number study is massive and dangerous, and once he teams up Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell), an NSA operative, the dynamic between the two of them should be interesting.
But the first episode left us a little flummoxed. We don’t think it gave viewers enough information for them to determine whether they want to stay with the show or not. All we really see in the first episode is that Edward is a bit of an a-hole, so taken with numbers and patterns that he tends to shun the attention of actual humans. He has no respect for Mallinder. And he thinks he’s going to determine the very reason humans exist through these prime numbers.
This isn’t exactly the character profile of someone we want to see outrun the bad guys. So perhaps the presence of Sanders will help. But it felt like there was too much mystery in the first episode to really latch onto what the story was. The episode ends in a surprise, which makes us even less sure about where the story is going. The storyline involving the chamber in Iraq also doesn’t tie in very well at first. In all, we see the potential for all of this to tie together very well, but the first episode was so slow-moving and so mysterious that we just couldn’t get a read on any of it.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode. Even with when Edward sleeps with Adam, it’s implied.
Parting Shot: Someone is found in a car with a gunshot wound. We then see a CCTV camera aimed right at that car.
Sleeper Star: We wish we saw Swindell in the first episode, but she’s not there.
Most Pilot-y Line: Edward goes on a roof with Adam and talks about trying to find a numerical pattern in the flying pattern of starlings. Adam seems to be interested, but, boy, that seems to be a stretch.
Our Call: STREAM IT. In the absence of more information about Prime Target, we’ll give the show a tentative recommendation. But this show is the rare case where the first episode just doesn’t give viewers enough to figure out whether the show is worth watching, and what we did see didn’t get us all that excited about what’s to come.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.