Leo Woodall conspiracy series Prime Target should have been a movie

Everyone loves a puzzle, and what’s more puzzling than a murder mystery with maths?

At least that’s what the producers of Prime Target are betting on, and hoping that the prospect of characters waxing lyrical about numbers, formulas and carrying the one over is not going to be a triggering turn-off.

Prime Target comes from Steve Miller, who’d previously co-created a series about Leonardo da Vinci and another called Deep State, and has now married the conspiracy show with one that references maths and archaeology. People’s contexts are revealing.

Starring Leo Woodall (One Day, The White Lotus), who is far too pretty to be a convincing maths nerd, it follows Cambridge mathematics student Edward Brooks who stumbles into a deadly plot when his work on prime numbers converges with the recent discovery of a very old chamber in Baghdad.

The crux of it is prime numbers patterns are used as the basis for all digital locks, and whatever Edward is cooking up has the potential to be a skeleton key to every computer, network and system in the world.

That’s something various parties are very invested in, both to have it and to kill it off.

His professor (David Morrissey) warns him off his thesis, acting erratically and making oblique references to someone else having paid dearly for the same research. Not long after, the professor is found dead (dun, dun, dun) of an apparent suicide.

At the same time, Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) is a hacker working for the American NSA, stationed out of France, which is secretly monitoring a raft of mathematicians. She notices something glitchy on the feed surveilling Edward’s professor. She realises Edward is the one making the breakthrough, not his mentor.

The third strand is the discovery of that millennia-old Iraqi chamber, the walls of which contain patterns that are connected to Edward’s work.

Predictably, everything is linked, and Edward and Taylah are both on the run and chasing shady figures with an agenda while trying to stay ahead of the NSA.

Can they trust Taylah’s godmother Jane (Martha Plimpton), the NSA’s Europe boss? What about Professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen), the widowed wife of Edward’s professor and an archaeology expert? How about the hunky bartender (Fra Free) Edward is hooking up with and who came on the scene at suspiciously the right time.

Prime Target is a classic espionage thriller that hops around between England, France and Iraq but it should have been a movie.

It has the DNA of on-the-run conspiracy movies such as The Pelican Brief or Enemy of the State, but stretched out over eight episodes, it’s frequently inert and unnecessarily twisty.

Set-pieces on a train, chases through Paris or the labyrinthine Cambridge campus all fill as if it’s just filling in time. A two-hour movie would’ve kept it tight and suspenseful.

Despite the luxury of almost eight hours, it there’s little character work or depth other than a couple of ethical questions over the morality of Edward’s work. His view on it is that, as pure mathematics, it is neutral and what people choose to do with it has nothing to do with him.

The show likes to think this question is the thematic foundation of its story but its interest in it is fleeting.

Prime Target is neither terrible nor great. Just another mediocre project in a sea of ordinary shows.

Prime Target is streaming on Apple TV+