May 16, 2005

In the world of television, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the writers and producers of hour-long crime dramas, and the viewers, who watch said dramas. These are their stories.

Be Careful Out There
Pythagoras Ain't Got Nothin' On Us:
Is Numb3rs changing the face of the cop show?
by Andreanna Ditton

I have... some questions. And some gripes to get out of the way, a factoring out of the bad to get to the x-factors of good.

The songs aren't light and fluffy, but the convergence of grinding, acidy guitar with the bright, bitter lyrics are meant to convey a certain dichotomy of emotion, not play like a cereal slogan for investigative procedure.

First of all, who decided that cop shows needed to have a theme song by a band that was big in prior decades? Damn you CSI for turning "Who Are You", "Won't Get Fooled Again" and "Baba O'Reilly" into cheery anthems of nose-to-the-grindstone perseverance and smug comeuppance.

Not that I mind a little Who with my crime, but the driving guitar licks seem like a taunting parody to the darker themes explored in these shows. The songs aren't light and fluffy, but the convergence of grinding, acidy guitar with the bright, bitter lyrics are meant to convey a certain dichotomy of emotion, not play like a cereal slogan for investigative procedure.

In that vein, who told the Scott brothers that using Talking Headsas theme music was more ironic? Granted, these days, David Byrne is slightly cooler than Pete Townshend, but still. OK, OK, I get it. "Once in a Lifetime" is a reflection of both the mathematical complexities that shape our physical world, and the emotional complexities faced by the Eppes boys. But I want my bittersweet rock 'n' roll safely back where it belongs: in my CD player! Even if it is accompanied by cool title graphics featuring a run of science's "who's who."

Second, really, who made the call on the title cute? I hate — really hate — that it's Numb3rs, not Numbers. It's like Se7en. I hate that too, although I like the movie and as punishment, we call it Sven. But I'm a word purist despite my predilection for typos and it's a word, not a pictogram. I'm one of those people who insists upon ordering a medium coffee at Starbucks instead of a grande, because really, that's just stupid. It's not grande, it's regular, average, the middle ground of coffee cup sizes. But I digress.

Smart is sexy.

Even more than the CSI franchise, Numb3rs makes geekery sexy. Part of this is the way that math is used, and part of it is the users of the math. Charlie Eppes (played by David Krumholtz) is sexy — except in the golfwear. No one is sexy in golfwear. He's also the logical successor to both The X-Files' Dana Scully and to decades of sidekicks and "experts" used in crime dramas to pass along vital pieces of information to Our Hero. While Scully was certainly groundbreaking in that her science provided both questions and answers, she was primarily an investigator. Charlie is definitely not. His training is in higher math, using numbers to pose theoretical answers. Yes, before our introduction to him, he has done some work for the NSA, which whetted his appetite for the application, but once his older brother, Don (Rob Morrow), asks for his help, Charlie expresses a renewed interest in using his numbers to solve crime, to channel theoretical mathematics into practical, tangible solutions.

Charlie's drive to provide answers, his focus on offering up his aid and his intelligence to these weekly causes, his intensity of focus, pulls in the viewer. Charlie's smarter than your average bear, even your average genetically mutated genius bear, but sadly, smart has not always been played as sexy on network TV, but here the intelligence is allowed to act as a lure, something as shiny and sexy as the actors warm eyes and warmer smile.

Much of the appeal comes from the curiosity factor. Charlie interprets the world around him through numbers, and much like Dana Scully, he doesn't believe there are answers out there his numbers can't provide and he's determined to prove this. While it's a trope, it's also a well-developed facet of the character. He understands why math works, is awed and fascinated by the answers it provides and is far more confused by the complexities of human beings, by things ruled by chaos or chance — romance, love, family, golf, but he's also opening himself up to those things.

Charlie finds joy in mathematics, but he also finds solace, uses them as a retreat, a place to hide emotionally and conceptually. He's not smug about his skills, lacks the quipped enhanced explanation offered by the CSIs; instead, he shows the numbers in action, ready to rock.

I also like the math geek sidekicks. I like that Peter MacNicol as Dr. Larry Fleinhardt gets to be quirky/smart/appealing in a show that involves no dancing babies. And I really like Charlie's grad student/assistant, Amita Ramanujan (Navi Rawat) She's beautiful and brainy and obviously extremely competent. She's less of a chaotic math freak than Charlie or Larry, and her competence and quiet affection for Charlie adds not only a nice element of potential romance, but also a meeting of the minds.

My personal language geek side likes that the show is introducing the word algorithm into the cultural vocabulary. Algorithm. Say it with me. Al-go-rithm. See, isn't it sexy? Using an established, complex pattern of equations to project a theory and establish a set of guidelines. It's just a nice idea. Well, that's my understanding of an algorithm. Actually, it's just using a series of steps over and over again to find a solution. It's police work boiled down to its most basic level.

Taking math out of the groan-and-bear-it realm of high school algebra and geometry, showing that we do use mathematical relationships in everyday life is a great way to convince the casual viewer to appreciate the discipline, but the show also offers a deeper exploration of what theoretical and practical mathematics can do.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons to like the show, and the lush lure of the mathematics is not the least among them. Taking math out of the groan-and-bear-it realm of high school algebra and geometry, showing that we do use mathematical relationships in everyday life is a great way to convince the casual viewer to appreciate the discipline, but the show also offers a deeper exploration of what theoretical and practical mathematics can do. What CSI has done for forensic science, Numb3rs is doing for higher-level math. It showcases both the benefits, and the moral gray areas of scientific and technological development, helping us to ask "Just because we can do something, should we?" A recent episode dealt with the ways that mathematics and science are used at the expense of social reform. A murdered mathematician had compiled a set of statistics to determine which kids were deserving of technological investment, projecting which children from which neighborhoods would be most likely to succeed. It was abuse of knowledge taken to an extreme, robbing people of their potential through cold data instead of human investment and it's an Episode that Charlie struggles with, balanced out by his brother's work with the FBI, his dad's easy compassion and his mentor's wide-ranging intelligence.

Charlie's struggle, and his appeal, also lies in the way he takes this gift, this thing that sets him apart from his family, from most of society and yearns to find a human face in it, human, flawed possibilities that discomfit him, but open up his understanding of his work and his life. In some ways, the show is not just about using math to solve crime in a way that reminds me as much of The Bloodhound Gang as of CSI, but also about the moral ramifications of our sciences, our knowledge. The strength of the show lies far more in its interpersonal relationships than it does in the mysteries, which tend to either be fun and wildly convoluted, or sort of needlessly drawn out and kind of boring.

Numb3rs isn't reinventing anything, mystery or procedural-wise. CSI, Without A Trace, Medium, Cold Case, etc., all have established hooks around which to solve mysteries. Numb3rs isn't unique in this. What it does well is to show how something theoretical can be applied to the practical, how theory and patterning exist in everyday life. It's a reflection of our cultural assumptions, a preview of personal behavior.

The core of the story is the Eppes family, the complicated relationship between Don Eppes and Charlie, about Don's reasons for coming back to Los Angeles, about Charlie's reasons for seeking out practical applications of his talents. It shows Los Angeles as a city like any other, dirty and gritty, multicultural and industrial, layering personality into my city that's normally shown as plastic personified. The Eppes are a normal family in this abnormal city, struggling to establish their own patterns as these three adult men interact, and as these two brothers interact, separated by vocation and age and perspective, they are drawn together by a basic interaction between good and evil, between the definitions of crime and the shadings of morality and the pure beauty of theory used to offer up answers and sometimes even justice.

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