Must every screen endeavor be an eight-episode limited series? The question has become a cliché, but let the record nevertheless show that Apple‘s newest production would have been a perfectly forgettable Tuesday afternoon matinée not so long ago. Or, better still, a CBS special for the home-on-Saturday-night crowd. Instead, Prime Target limps along for the better part of a full-time shift, trailing increasingly unlikely flotsam as it goes. Cambridge math dons, government spooks, think-tankers, Iraqi archeologists: Of course they’re all caught up in a plot to save or destroy the world. 

The show follows Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall), a mathematical postdoc at Britain’s second-oldest university. Obsessed with finding a pattern in nature, Edward has zeroed in on prime numbers, believing them to hold not only discovery but the key to civic flourishing.