Prime Target

What “Prime Target” adds up to is an engaging, entertaining mix of scholarship and skullduggery that ultimately won’t do anything to convert those of us who thought math would be bad for our health.

A barmy but entertaining thriller.

It is derivative, preposterous, utterly unbelievable and great fun. It’s got confidence and style and is here to deliver escapism to the power of pi cubed, or something, and it does. Prime ridiculous entertainment.

The best parts of Prime Target are entrenched in the intellectual mystery of the plot, which brings out a heady conspiracy narrative somewhere between The Bourne Identity and National Treasure.

At times, the series could attempt to stand out a little more from the crowded pack of the spy genre, and it is also in periodic need of clarity over which force is in play for what reason, but overall, Prime Target is a well-performed, capably written, and well-structured spy thriller.

Ultimately realism isn’t the strong suit of “Prime Target.” .... A show about smart people that still allows you to turn down your brain and have a good time.

Even though it telegraphs its “surprises” way too often, it’s always entertaining — even as it gets tied up into plot knots by its end. As a bonus, Martha Plimpton co-stars and Stephen Rea appears in a smaller role. They get to chew a bit of the scenery, and it’s a welcome addition to this passable thriller that’s elevated by its lead star.

Basically, “Prime Target” is an engine to set two attractive young people on the run through a number of set pieces, interspersed with arguments about transparency and responsibility and whether there is such a thing as pure science in a dirty world.

While the show offers moments of brilliance, especially in its early episodes, it ultimately fails to deliver on the grand potential of its ideas, leaving a story that feels more like a tantalizingly unsolved equation than a world-changing mathematical breakthrough.

Prime Target is playing with known formulas and well-worn tropes, turning to real-life anxieties about privacy and surveillance for narrative fodder. But in wrapping them all around maths—and a character who’d rather not be part of this story at all—the series keeps running into dead ends that are never as interesting nor as exciting as this would-be spy thriller presents them as.

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.

Even those who are fascinated by algebraic theories and doomsday scenarios will find it a sludgy chore not worth completing.

I slogged on, beguiled by the strong cast (David Morrissey, Sidse Babett Knudsen, Quintessa Swindell, Fra Fee, Stephen Rea), some of whom, as is typical of prestige streamer thrillers, seem to have about three scenes each. Then a sinister maths institute was slung into the mix and the glossy tedium got too much.

The first episode is sufficiently zippy to pull you in, but as a bingewatch it soon sags under the weight of a nonsensical plot and a feeling that everything you are seeing has been thrown in to satisfy the algorithm.

If a drama about an unlikable person is to be compelling, the character has to be interesting – funny or evil or intriguingly complex, for example. Ed is just an affectless bore and an affectless bore in jeopardy does not make for gripping television.

As lively as a statistics manual and just as riveting. Neither action nor dialogue do justice to this ambitious series, or its two leads, who deserve far better.

Serves up basically competent if unmemorable action and raises worthwhile if not exactly novel debates. But it does not show the math, serving two-dimensional pawns instead of three-dimensional characters and lofty-sounding speeches instead of nuanced dialogue — and, as a result, fails to add up to much at all.

Despite the capabilities of its talented lead actors, Prime Target misses its mark, proving to be a hollow, frustrating, and ultimately forgettable viewing experience.

[Edward] is neither written well enough nor played particularly strongly to warrant any interest beyond the central relationships he finds himself at the center of. Woodall delivers each bloated line with a woodenness fitting of his name, making “Prime Target” more grating with each episode.