Lift Up Your Hearts!

First a confession:  We have recently gone over to the Dark Side.  That is, we joined Netflix.

Despite our firm convictions that television and movies on the whole are an assault on the mind and spirit, as well as a waste of time, we are not total Luddites and appreciate that the video medium has its good purposes.  One of which might occasionally be simply relaxing with one's family.  :)

That last purpose was getting harder and harder to accomplish, since our local video stores have moved to concentrating on the latest movies, "kiddie shows," and video games.  It's next to impossible to find good mysteries, old movies, or anything educational.  Enter Netflix.  I'm all for supporting local businesses (or even mega-businesses with a local presence), but if they won't stock anything worth renting, I'll seek out a business that does.

Which brings me to the subject of this post.  At one point—it must be a few years ago now—we discovered the TV show, Numb3rs.  I was immediately entranced and could have become {gasp} hooked on a weekly TV show, except that its 10 p.m. slot meant not getting to sleep until after 11, and no show is worth that on a regular basis.

But then we joined Netflix.  Now we have seen the entire first season of Numb3rs, and a third of the second, spread out over about three months.  I probably should wait till I've caught up with today before writing, but I won't, because right now my review is positive, and I'm always afraid the show will degenerate as so many have done.  For the same reason, I've so far avoided websites that discuss the show.  I hope I'm wrong—but the few episodes we've seen of the current season don't make me too optimistic.  Nonetheless—

(First, a very quick synopsis for those who aren't familiar with the show.  Charlie and Don Eppes are brothers.  Don is an FBI agent; Charlie is a math genius, former child prodigy, now math professor at the fictional Cal Sci—clearly modeled after Cal Tech, whose consultants help out with the show's mathematics.  Each episode of Numb3rs features Charlie and some of his Cal Sci buddies using mathematics to help the FBI solve crimes.)

I love this show! For a number of reasons, the first of which is that, unlike almost every television show I've happened upon in the last oh-so-many years, it is relatively inoffensive.  Amazingly so.  I can't turn on network television for  10 minutes without being utterly repulsed, it seems.  Considering the show is about Los Angeles, criminals, and the FBI, one could call the language unrealistic.  This is a good thing.  If I wanted to hear that kind of language, I could return to vounteering at the local high school.  As it is, I wasn't bothered, though there are still some phrases I'd rather not hear my grandchildren repeating.  It's not a show suitable for them for other reasons, anyway.

Although their are occasional sexual crimes on the show, they are dealt with reasonably.  As far as the main characters go, sexual references are there, but few and far between.  One character is revealed as having lived with someone (outside of marriage) in the past, and another briefly mentions a sexual experience, but other than that we are spared those details (so far).  In the last episode (of the first season), the FBI catches a criminal in bed with his girlfriend, but even that wasn't too bad.  This may not sound restrained, but let me assure those of you who haven't peeped in on the recent TV/movie scene, this is a major step in the right direction for Hollywood!

If a show is about crime, there will be violence, but this, too, is understated.  (The pilot is the worst of what we've seen so far, and it's still better than most crime shows.)

That's what the show is not, and I go into all that detail first because there are those reading here who would really enjoy Numb3rs who don't like unpleasant surprises.

But what makes Numb3rs such a good show?  After all, if all you want to do is avoid bad language, sexual references, and violence, you don't have to watch any show at all.

Well, for one thing, it's not just about crime; it's about family.  Charlie, Don, and their dad live together in a pleasant home.  (Don and Charlie's mother died of cancer before the first episode, which provides some poignant moments. )  Actually, Don has his own apartment, but spends a lot of time back home.  They eat together, talk together, and play games together.  (Are you beginning to see a little resemblance here to my own family?)  The father is kindly, intelligent, and wise—characteristics not often associated with fathers by today's writers.  The brothers have their issues and occasional squabbles, but they clearly love, respect, and care for one another.

But most of all, I love Numb3rs because I can relate to it.  I watch the interactions amongst the various Cal Sci professors and students and want to shout, "I know these people!"  One of the reasons I find television shows and movies boring for the most part is that they are so totally unreal, and don't intersect my world in any way.  Numb3rs is different.

When Charlie tries to explain to Don that he can't just make his brain work on anything he wants to, that he must work on the problem that his brain is pursuing at the moment, I know exactly what he means.  I'm no math genius, and I know that discipline can be bridle and bit to the mind, but I also know how much more effective and efficient I am when I can give my brain its head, so to speak, and let it run with whatever is inspiring it at the moment of inspiration and for however long the course lasts.

When he groans at interruptions I know the frustration of having to start a whole line of thinking again because it has been broken, and of losing the tenuous idea altogether.  I don't identify with his doing math while listening to blaring rock music on his headphones—but he's younger than me.  :)

I love to hear the conversations between Charlie and his friend Larry, the physicist, because they sound like people I know, and sometimes even conversations I have had.  I even get some of the jokes.  They talk about things that matter in my world.

In other words, for all its obviously fictional qualities, I find Numb3rs believable—real people, real families, real work.  That's more than I can say about the rest of Hollywood's output, even (or especially) so-called realistic drama and "reality" shows.

Not that television shows matter, really.  There are better things to do with the time.  But the human nature is such that one cannot help delighting in the feeling that someone, somewhere, understands.  Even if only a little, and even if it is a made-up TV show.

Not that it's without some common Hollywood faults.  The female main characters are all drop-dead gorgeous as well as supremely competent, and the men aren't so bad, either.  Not much reality there.  Worse, the writers, producers, directors, and actors can't seem to shake basic Hollywood assumptions any more than a fish can shake his aquatic environment.  It's easy to catch the standard liberal digs thrown in, such as the U. S. government training terrorists in Colombia, and the stupidty of the Department of Homeland Security.  Worse, although as I said the sexual subplots are (or have been so far) mimimal, there is a basic assumption that any romantic relationship naturally leads to sex and moving in together, sans marriage, of course.  It seems Hollywood finds esoteric mathematicians easier to understand than those they refer to as "red state people."

You learn a lot from the extra features on the DVD about the attitudes of the actors and directors, not all of it good.  I was pleased to learn one thing about David Krumholtz, who portrays Charlie, however:  As a young student he had to take Algebra I three times, having failed twice.  But he became interested in the math his character was doing, and attended lectures and classes to try to understand it better.  At first they needed a "hand double"—someone else to write the equations on the board—but after a while he could do his own writing.

This review has sat around for over a month waiting to be better organized, so I'm calling blogger's privilege and just publishing it as it is.  Bottom line:  Numb3rs is a crime show, with themes that I would not want to have to explain to a young person.  But with that caveat, I highly recommend it.  Especially on DVD, with commercials removed.  it's amazing how much better a story flows when it's not constantly interrupted.

UPDATE April 3, 2008  We've just finished Season Two.  I still enjoy the shows, although the season ender was weird as well as offensive and if Season 3 is consistently like that we may not make it through them all.  The show is definitely formulaic, but I like the formula, so that's not the problem.  I actually prefered it when they stuck to the math and didn't delve so much into the characters' private lives.  Well, some of that was okay—I particularly like the warm-and-fuzzy family scenes—but Hollywood's basic assumptions regarding sexual behavior ruins the romantic-interest angle for me.  Numb3rs has definitly upped the ante on the sex-violence-bad language, though it is still better than most.  Sad that they can't leave one show that's adult without being offensive!

As I mentioned earlier, it's the basic Hollywood worldview that provides most of the offense.  The last show of the second season found nothing unreasonable about dream-visitation of the living by the dead, but the presence of a Bible in someone's home noteworthy and suspicious, and a character's statement that he and his girlfriend did not believe in having sex without marriage to be so peculiar as to make him into the chief suspect.

Larry the physicist is still my favorite character, though, and it's almost worth watching just for him.  On to Season Three! 

UPDATE May 27, 2008  Season Three is done, and I'm more than a little frustrated that Season 4 is not yet available.  The last episode of Season Three had some interesting twists but even more holes and logical inconsistencies that would be fun to discuss—if I could find the one other person in the world who has watched up to the end of Season Three but none of Season Four.  I won't talk about them here for fear of doing to someone else what Netflix did to me:  Whoever wrote the synopsis for the Season Four DVDs included a serious spoiler for the previous season.  Not cool.

All that aside, what I wrote in the April 3 update still holds.  The Hollywood worldview continues to intrude.  The sex-language-violence is to the point where I can tolerate it for the sake of the whole story, but can no longer recommend the series without serious caveats.  I'd say it's about to the level of the early James Bond movies.  But the basic premise of the show is still delightful, most of the stories are interesting, and there's a decent amount of character development that makes the whole team—not just Larry anymore—likeable.

On the whole Season Three was better than the last episode of Season Two.  It's a shame the writers think they have to do something bizarre in the season-ender.