Apple TV: “Prime Target” starring Leo Woodall

As a high school student I was a whiz at algebra. Then came trig and calculus which I found pretty difficult if not downright deadly.

But I never realized out HOW deadly math could be until I watched all eight episodes of the edge-of-your-seat spy thriller “Prime Suspect” on Apple TV.

The protagonist is young Ed (Leo Woodall, who played the gay-for-pay crew hand in “White Lotus, Season 2.) He’s a graduate student at Cambridge working on a thesis about prime numbers. These numbers follow a pattern that mathematicians have yet to identify, and Ed is determined to crack the code.

But what he doesn’t realize is that governments and shady corporate concerns are spying on thinkers like Ed who might get too close to solving this riddle. Apparently all sorts of data security systems depend on the code remaining unbreakable. Cracking the code gives you access to money, information—in short, everything.

Once Ed is identified as such a valuable target, the chase is on—from the hallowed halls of Cambridge, to Baghdad (where the clue to the prime number theory may lie on an etching in an ancient library), to a Hitchcockian showdown in the English Channel Tunnel—a chase complete with bad guys all trying to get their hands on Ed’s work—and Ed himself.

Ed continues to believe his work is “pure”. Fortunately, he’s met Tayla (Quintessa Swindell), a security professional with the NSA (a veiled version of the CIA). She makes it her business to watch over innocents like Ed and quickly dispels his naïvete, becoming his confidante and quasi-bodyguard.

The shady characters who want Ed’s formula at all costs include Jane (Martha Plimpton), an NSA official gone bad; Jane’s slimy boss Andrew (Harry Lloyd), and Professor Alderman, a creepy Cambridge math don, played by Stephen Rea (“The Crying Game.”)

Woodall is cast against type as a math nerd, but his performance works nonetheless and he is downright charming. Swindell is a perfect foil for Ed—a combination tech support and ninja warrior, and one of the few characters you can root for in this villain-heavy series.

As Ed and Tayla race across Europe in incredibly short periods of time, you can’t help feeling that you’re watching a thriller that’s a cut above-—as good as the best of the “Bourne” series. It even manages to make academia look sexy. And if that doesn’t spike an increase in applications to Cambridge, I’ll eat my mortarboard. Hoping for Season 2 of “Prime Target.” Creator Steve Thompson, are you listening?

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