What could be more old-fashioned right now than another newfangled cop show? Thanks to the CBS "CSI" shows and to a lesser extent NBC's "Law & Order" oeuvre, we're all becoming experts on the latest thing in scientific criminology and fancy-pants lab work. FYI, DNA is SOP. Some producer should bring back "Stop, or I'll shoot" and "Book 'em, Danno" and all those other once-beloved low-tech cop cliches.
But that's not what the CBS eye has up its sleeve -- so to speak. "Numb3rs," a cop show so cool that it uses a numeral 3 where an e should be in its title, is about crime-solving as a kind of bingo game for geniuses. "Everything is numbers," declares the reigning whiz in the show's premiere tomorrow night at about 10 (depending on the duration of a prime-time football game) on about Channel 9.
Rob Morrow, right, plays agent Don Eppes, who recruits his math-whiz brother to help solve cases for the FBI.
(Stefano Paltera -- AP)
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We're kidding, although viewers with digital sets may actually see the show not on Channel 9 but on Channel 9.1. Maybe numbers are everything, like the guy said, but unfortunately, "everything" would include "boring," at least in this case. There's something stubbornly unexciting about watching a brainy boy rush to a blackboard because he's got "a new equation," feverishly erasing one set of numbers so he can scribble a new set in its place.
"Numb3rs" supplements these blackboard calisthenics with the equally tedious, and virtually inescapable, mad dashes to computers to type some fabulous new data on the keyboard. Somehow the numbers can tell the crime fighters that the killer wears tennis shoes or collects "Star Wars" memorabilia or watches ABC on Sunday nights (uh-oh!).
No matter how often we're told how unbearably fascinating it all is, it isn't. It's more likely to trigger horrifying flashbacks to algebra class.
Rob Morrow makes his return to episodic television in the starring role -- a diligent and vigilant FBI special agent named Don Eppes who has a brother, Charlie, played as well as the part probably could ever be played (what with Olivier and Brando dead and all) by David Krumholtz. Charlie dabbles in "predictive analysis" and other mathematical super-stuff when not testing race cars as a way of adding a little action to the show. Krumholtz is inventive enough to do new variations on the old nerd stereotype that make the character tolerable and even engaging.
In the premiere, they and everybody else in the police department are trying to find a serial rapist -- there can't be a cop show on TV that hasn't been visited by at least one of these fiends -- and luckily this one has chosen some kind of mathematical pattern for his crimes. Charlie uses data to narrow down the area where the sociopath -- who suffocates his victims after raping them -- might live.
Brother Don, conspicuously borrowing from NBC's "Medium" and other shows about psychic culprit-catchers, has a vision or two that shows the killer lurking about. Such scenes are obligatory because, it is assumed, the audience is so bloodthirsty it will reject cop shows where the criminals are not seen going about their business. "Numb3rs" has an excess of gore, though no more than the other nouveau cop shows.
Some venerable cop-show cliches do show up, apparently deemed too essential (and too commercial) to retire. Everywhere you look at the police station you see pretty women, though of course they're smart as well as pretty, most of them, and Sabrina Lloyd as Don's partner, Terry, fills both bills handily. A very distinctive-looking actor named Alimi Ballard plays another of the agents, one who mainly recites exposition before getting shoved into the background. Since Ballard is African American, this is a dismaying development.
The requisite braying, bullying supervisor, who thinks this numbers business is a lot of hooey, is played by Anthony Heald as yet another big jerk of a boss. He's so hostile to the numbers boys that he takes Don Eppes off the case, just as stubborn and shortsighted old fools have been doing to good cops in bad TV shows since, seemingly, Matlock was in didees. Judd Hirsch, who has been around equally long, plays the Eppes boys' shrewd old dear of a daddy, apparently an ex-cop himself.
Ridley ("Alien") Scott and his brother Tony ("Top Gun") Scott are among the executive producers; the others have less impressive achievements to put in parentheses. For the record, Rob ("Northern Exposure") Morrow is starting to look old and frumpy, and he just doesn't appear to be very happy to be starring in this series -- understandable under the circumstances. More and more, these shows are about laboratories and machines and chemicals and autopsies, not about characters and relationships and human conflict.
In network parlance, "numbers" is another word for "ratings," as in, "How were last night's 'Numb3rs' numbers?" However high or low the ratings turn out to be, its central gimmick isn't enough to elevate it above the merely average. It's likely to be habit-forming only for the very, very vulnerably addictive.
Numb3rs (one hour) premieres at 10 p.m. tomorrow on Channel 9.
