Prime Target

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.