Despite its high-minded plot, Prime Target is the kind of show that you can turn your brain off for. The series combines international intrigue, government conspiracies and a handful of action-adjacent sequences to make a serviceable, if predictable, thriller. You’ll undoubtedly see worse television this year, but that bad TV will almost certainly be more memorable.
Prime Target starts with an interesting enough concept: Cambridge post grad Ed Brooks (Leo Woodall) is a brilliant theoretical mathematician, and his research is being watched by several interested parties. Basically, his thesis about prime numbers and their relevance to emerging tech could disrupt the world as we know it. Though Ed is insistent that math is just math, many are interested in weaponizing it. That luckily doesn’t include NSA agent Taylah (Quintessa Swindell), who steps in to work with Ed and put together the pieces of an ever-growing puzzle.
Some of those pieces include Taylah’s superiors at the NSA, her godmother Jane (Martha Plimpton) and her boss Andrew (Harry Lloyd), who have a vested interest in any and all mathematical advancements. Ed’s own professors at Cambridge are involved too, with fellow mathematician Robert (David Morrissey) actively discouraging his potentially dangerous research. Meanwhile, Robert’s wife Andrea (Sidse Babett Knudsen) is due to investigate an unearthed medieval library in Baghdad, one that just may hold the key to Ed’s work. All of this is overseen by master of the college James Alderman (Stephen Rea), a man keen on keeping his and Cambridge’s legacy intact.
Prime Target is a globetrotting adventure, and it makes good use of its locations. A set piece taking place in the Channel Tunnel between France and England is memorable and inventive, and Cambridge can’t help but be visually arresting. It’s an attempt at bringing the show to a global scale a la Amazon’s Citadel or any number of Netflix original movies, though lavish locations don’t always mean high quality. This isn’t a Jason Bourne installment or a Mission: Impossible sequel (though the finale does see Woodall doing a rather pitiful Tom Cruise sprint), but that espionage intrigue is what the series seems to be going for at times.
The story is simultaneously muddled and formulaic, in the sense that it’s obsessed with twists that you can see from a continent away. It’s one of those shows where 75% of the characters end up evil, and with that rate of nefariousness, it’s never a surprise when someone betrays our heroes. There’s inevitably a Big Twist for the series’ Big Bad, one as expected as it is ultimately pointless—a reveal done for the sake of a reveal, rather than an organically developed villain with clearly written motivations.
The ever-compounding number of Ed and Taylah’s foes gets bland quick, and unfortunately the two make for some fairly boring leads as well. Woodall has charmed on TV before with his work in The White Lotus and One Day, but he’s quite dull as Ed. The character is a socially awkward genius, sometimes bordering on socially inept, a familiar archetype that the actor does very little with. Sure, anyone would be pouty if multiple shadowy organizations were after their research, but Woodall’s performance never really gets past that moodiness. Swindell (who uses they/he pronouns) fares slightly better; they get more emotionally bombastic scenes to chew on, but Taylah’s consistently told-not-shown backstory makes for a lot of clunky line deliveries. Suffice to say, seasoned supporting players like Plimpton and Rea don’t get much to do either.
Math has been made interesting on screen before, but Prime Target is no A Beautiful Mind. With that subject matter being the only paltry thing separating it from every other dramatic thriller on streaming right now, the series fails to stand out or stake a claim for itself among the masses. It’s not ever particularly boring, and some story beats get goofy enough to be quite entertaining, but that doesn’t add up to a worthwhile miniseries.
The first two episodes of Prime Target begin streaming on AppleTV+ on January 22nd, 2025.
