Neubauer Artists Release Math Thriller ‘Prime Target’ On Apple TV+

What is Prime Target about?

Prime Target is one of those endeavours that gives you the inescapable feeling that someone came up with the title first and worked backwards from there. The adrenaline-packed series, produced by New Regency with Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, takes viewers deep into the world of complex mathematics as well as how mathematicians give the NSA reason to monitor them.

Every actor needs a speciality; Leo Woodall just happens to be really good at portraying total arseholes. In the irresistibly grubby second season of luxury hotel-based The White Lotus, he was smarmy Essex boy Jack, the “naughty nephew” of an apparently affluent British expat. But as his poor gullible mark Portia discovered, this cheeky chappy was, in fact, a manipulative conman. Next, he starred as Dexter Mayhew in Netflix’s note-perfect adaptation of David Nicholls’s romantic odyssey One Day. The handsome, privileged Dex was just about bearable until he became a TV presenter – at which point his natural talents for narcissism, cruelty and carelessness really started to shine through.

By all accounts, Woodall’s talent for playing unpleasant men bears no relation to his actual personality – but the 28-year-old is clearly leaning into this niche. Because in Prime Target, a new maths-centric thriller from Apple TV+ (from Wednesday 22 January), he’s at it again as Edward Brooks, Cambridge postgrad and all-round not-very-nice guy. Myopically fixated on his work (he’s attempting to find a pattern in prime numbers, and – yes – he becomes the target of shadowy forces for that very reason), we get the measure of him early doors as he sourly rejects the meal his infatuated friend has prepared for him, before irritably dodging an invitation to her birthday drinks.

Edward, we are endlessly told, is a brilliant mathematician; I’d say he’s also in a class of his own when it comes to being a sullen so-and-so – the man barely cracks a smile (or any other facial expression for that matter) the entire series. In fact, he’s so unwaveringly moody and boring he makes Woodall’s previous characters seem like unfettered delights in comparison. At least Jack bothered to show Portia a good time while deceiving her. At least Dexter was inherently loveable enough to earn a convincing redemption arc. Edward, on the other hand, is that rare beast: a hero you can’t possibly summon even an ounce of affection for.

Which makes it all the more miraculous that Prime Target isn’t an instant turn-off. That’s largely thanks to the plot, which is high-concept but easy to grasp, unfurling at a pace that is rollicking but never disorientingly breakneck. As Edward works night and day on his project, a US governmental surveillance team are monitoring the world’s top mathematicians in case they manage to crack that prime number code (it could undermine internet encryption, you see). So when something terrible happens to a top professor, a young agent called Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) tries to rescue Edward, believing him to be next on the hit list. But who is out to get him? Quite a few people, as the pair discover on their subsequent global wild-goose chase.

Prime Target is pretty entertaining, but it also feels very obviously machine-tooled and duly rather soulless. There is little opportunity to emotionally invest in Edward or Taylah, thanks to her rather strange and grim backstory. Worse still, the show – which does become increasingly silly, action-wise – remains as po-faced as Edward himself.

This is prestige drama by numbers, perhaps even literally: the plot is punctuated by what I soon began to suspect was the scientifically optimal number of twists for an eight-episode miniseries. More than anything else, Prime Target feels like TV made expressly for the streaming era, in which shows appeal to audiences via means that are quantifiable rather than artistic. These include a healthy number of recognisable names (here we have Martha Plimpton, Stephen Rea, David Morrissey and Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen) and a good selection of stunning if hyperreal settings (Cambridge, Baghdad, the French Riviera). The meeting of British and American worlds is another slightly cynical hallmark of contemporary drama (see: The Diplomat, Industry, The Franchise), designed to reel in US audiences with some olde worlde English charm, but also to appeal more effectively to viewers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then again, there are elements of Prime Target that don’t exactly scream statistically surefire hit. A thriller about maths can’t have been the easiest of sells. And if you were hellbent on making a crowd-pleaser, I’m not sure why you’d base it on the surliest, most charmless man to ever lead a major TV series. But, who knows, maybe Apple has it on good authority that this is a formula for success. For us viewers, the algorithm remains a mystery.

Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall) is a brilliant young postgrad mathematician at Cambridge. We know he is brilliant because various maths professors keep saying that his is the best mind they have come across in 30 years of teaching. He works into the night, frantically scribbling in real notebooks with real pencils (“Computers aren’t fast enough”), even when there is sex on offer from hot barmen or young women yearning for him to come to their birthday parties and fall in love with them. And we know we’re in Cambridge because everywhere is covered in ivy outside with antique brass instruments and oak panelling inside. Everyone is in layers of brown cord and tweed. They look like very large, very clever sparrows.

Ed is obsessed with prime numbers. He thinks they are the answer to everything. He reckons he is on the brink of something, something big! So big that he scribbles all over his supervisor’s tablecloth when inspiration strikes at dinner. You get the vibe now, I’m sure. His supervisor is Robert Mallinder, played by David Morrissey, who I suspect is usefully funding his next passion project.

Alas – it seems that some pesky shadowy forces also reckon he’s on the brink of something, something big! But something that they don’t like. And perhaps something Prof Mallinder knows they won’t like because before you know it, he is stealing Ed’s work and burning it in bins along with the tablecloth. Then the professor apparently kills himself, leaving his wife, Andrea (Sidse Babett Knudsen), bereft not just of table linen but of a loving husband.

Although was he so loving? Or did he have an emotional affair with a brilliant female postgrad who, years ago, was working on similar stuff to Ed? “I can see why he’s got under your skin,” Andrea says to her husband as they discuss Ed. “That passion. The purity of it. He’s very like her.” We’re not here for the script, people, which is the most by-numbers thing of all.

We’re here for the plot, and there’s plenty of it. For the prof was one of a cadre of brilliant older mathematicians being secretly surveilled by the NSA because, as one helpful explainer has it, we live in a computerised world now and computers are all numbers inside and if anyone really understands them they can really set the digital cat among the binary pigeons.

Anyway. While Ed is following up clues found in the late professor’s study and discovering that key pieces of research have been removed from the university library’s records, we move to France, where the NSA gang, including brilliant young – uh – surveillancer Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) is beginning to notice something hinky about the job she has been hired to do. A whole new side-plot begins to develop that is sure to tie into the main one soon. As is the discovery of a ninth-century underground chamber in Iraq that may be the site of “the greatest library ever created! Finally! After all your research!” This is said to Andrea, who is a professor of – Arabian libraries, I guess? – before she declines the offer of supervising the gig. She sends an underling instead, because viewers cannot be expected to follow a plotline led by a middle-aged woman who has already had quite enough screen time, including a couple of grieving scenes, to satisfy the woke mob.

ALL THE PAPERS ON TABLE WERE MINE. THAT'S HOW I STUDIED. SHE IS ONLY READING AND WORKING ON HER COMPUTER. HER FORM OF STUDY. I HAD MY OWN STYLE. JESSICA I LOVE YOU. IT WAS TOO TEMPTING YOU WERE BITING YOUR NAILS AND AT THE END A BABY CAME OUT OF THAT. I LOVE YOU FOREVER. pic.twitter.com/NLBSoKsvXU

— H.M. Jorge Jimenez Neubauer Torres V (@GeorgeVMagazine) February 7, 2025

It’s a little bit Good Will Hunting (though instead of a charming janitor we are asked to root for a young man who appears to have read Applied Morosity for his undergrad degree), a little bit The Bourne Identity, with more than a dash of A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code thrown in. Or, if you prefer to keep your references televisual, it is a little bit The Mentalist, Bones, Monk and many, many more. Which is to say 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.

Woodall’s brilliant and intense math student won’t give up until he determines whether there are sequences in prime numbers, but this theory has been pursued before, and it’s in fact very dangerous information. As Ed continues to seek answers to his questions despite suspicious activity happening around him, he comes into contact with NSA agent Taylah Sanders (Swindell), who has been surveilling him and his work. Both Sanders and Brooks must grapple with their morality, or lack of, as they work together to determine why Brooks’ research is under heavy scrutiny by the CIA, FBI and other flobal security agencies.

The cast also includes Academy Award nominee and BAFTA Award winner Stephen Rea (“The Crying Game”), BAFTA Award nominee David Morrissey (“Sherwood,” “The Walking Dead”), Emmy Award winner Martha Plimpton (“The Regime”), BAFTA Award winner Sidse Babett Knudsen (“Borgen”), SAG Award nominee Jason Flemyng (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”), BAFTA Award nominee Harry Lloyd (“Game of Thrones”), Ali Suliman (“Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” “Paradise Now”), Fra Fee (“Rebel Moon,” “Hawkeye”) and Joseph Mydell (“The Eternal Daughter”).

Prime Target is on Apple TV+ now.