I don't watch much TV. I tune in to CBC's The Mercer Report for the brief few months that it's on each season; I record episodes of the terrific show How It's Made and then watch them while working out in our little basement "gym"; we'd been catching up on the rebroadcasts of the jaw-droppingly beautiful show Planet Earth, but then Karen got me the DVD for my birthday, so now we're watching it at our leisure; I was a big CSI fan in the early going, but lately I've found too many of the plots to be gratuitously depraved and inane.
No, I'm not warming up to a rant about TV being a weapon of mass distraction. I don't begrudge people their entertainments. Whatever gets you through the night and all that. I'd just rather spend what little leisure time I have reading books or working on interesting projects. 'Nuff said.
My overall lack of interest in TV extends to the fall season and its attendant hype. I don't pay any attention to it, and the news of only a few shows penetrates my thick outer defenses each season. So that must be why, a few years ago, I completely missed the introduction of a new CBS show called Numb3rs, and the show remained off my radar for its first three seasons (a fourth is about to start later this month). It wasn't until I was reading the September issue of The Atlantic magazine and came across a column by Virgina Postrel called Beautiful Minds that the penny dropped:
CSI's success also fostered a less-probable hit: Numb3rs, beginning its fourth season, the first detective show featuring a math prodigy as hero and algorithms as high-tech weapons. Enthusiastically accepting the pitch for Numb3rs, a studio executive declared, "This show will do for math what CSI has done for science."
What the...? How could a show with "a math prodigy as hero" have escaped my notice? For three years! There was no time to lose, so Karen rented the first season DVD and we hunkered down to watch the pilot episode last night. The show was, for the most part, typical cops-and-robbers fare (the cops, in this case, being FBI types and the robber being a serial killer) done in the dark, stylish look that I call crime noir. But there was one unique element that made the show leap out from the pack: equations! Not just one or two, and not just quick flashes of symbols, but tons of them, splashed boldly on blackboards and projected proudly onto the screen. All in the service of helping to solve a crime.
The show's overarching theme, as stated by the "math prodigy" character Charlie Eppes, appears to be that "everything is numbers," a conceit that math fans everywhere will love. Physics types love to quote Lord Kelvin: "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." But math geeks know that physics rests on the broader firmament of mathematics. "Go down deep enough into anything and you will find mathematics" (Dean Schlicter). How refreshing to see that sentiment echoed in a TV show.