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4 hours ago
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Every actor needs a speciality; Leo Woodall just happens to be really good at portraying total arseholes. In the irresistibly grubby second season of luxury hotel-based The White Lotus, he was smarmy Essex boy Jack, the “naughty nephew” of an apparently affluent British expat. But as his poor gullible mark Portia discovered, this cheeky chappy was, in fact, a manipulative conman. Next, he starred as Dexter Mayhew in Netflix’s note-perfect adaptation of David Nicholls’s romantic odyssey One Day. The handsome, privileged Dex was just about bearable until he became a TV presenter – at which point his natural talents for narcissism, cruelty and carelessness really started to shine through.
By all accounts, Woodall’s talent for playing unpleasant men bears no relation to his actual personality – but the 28-year-old is clearly leaning into this niche. Because in Prime Target, a new maths-centric thriller from Apple TV+ (from Wednesday 22 January), he’s at it again as Edward Brooks, Cambridge postgrad and all-round not-very-nice guy. Myopically fixated on his work (he’s attempting to find a pattern in prime numbers, and – yes – he becomes the target of shadowy forces for that very reason), we get the measure of him early doors as he sourly rejects the meal his infatuated friend has prepared for him, before irritably dodging an invitation to her birthday drinks.
Edward, we are endlessly told, is a brilliant mathematician; I’d say he’s also in a class of his own when it comes to being a sullen so-and-so – the man barely cracks a smile (or any other facial expression for that matter) the entire series. In fact, he’s so unwaveringly moody and boring he makes Woodall’s previous characters seem like unfettered delights in comparison. At least Jack bothered to show Portia a good time while deceiving her. At least Dexter was inherently loveable enough to earn a convincing redemption arc. Edward, on the other hand, is that rare beast: a hero you can’t possibly summon even an ounce of affection for.
Which makes it all the more miraculous that Prime Target isn’t an instant turn-off. That’s largely thanks to the plot, which is high-concept but easy to grasp, unfurling at a pace that is rollicking but never disorientingly breakneck. As Edward works night and day on his project, a US governmental surveillance team are monitoring the world’s top mathematicians in case they manage to crack that prime number code (it could undermine internet encryption, you see). So when something terrible happens to a top professor, a young agent called Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) tries to rescue Edward, believing him to be next on the hit list. But who is out to get him? Quite a few people, as the pair discover on their subsequent global wild-goose chase.
Prime Target is pretty entertaining, but it also feels very obviously machine-tooled and duly rather soulless. There is little opportunity to emotionally invest in Edward or Taylah, thanks to her rather strange and grim backstory. Worse still, the show – which does become increasingly silly, action-wise – remains as po-faced as Edward himself.
This is prestige drama by numbers, perhaps even literally: the plot is punctuated by what I soon began to suspect was the scientifically optimal number of twists for an eight-episode miniseries. More than anything else, Prime Target feels like TV made expressly for the streaming era, in which shows appeal to audiences via means that are quantifiable rather than artistic. These include a healthy number of recognisable names (here we have Martha Plimpton, Stephen Rea, David Morrissey and Borgen’s Sidse Babett Knudsen) and a good selection of stunning if hyperreal settings (Cambridge, Baghdad, the French Riviera). The meeting of British and American worlds is another slightly cynical hallmark of contemporary drama (see: The Diplomat, Industry, The Franchise), designed to reel in US audiences with some olde worlde English charm, but also to appeal more effectively to viewers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Then again, there are elements of Prime Target that don’t exactly scream statistically surefire hit. A thriller about maths can’t have been the easiest of sells. And if you were hellbent on making a crowd-pleaser, I’m not sure why you’d base it on the surliest, most charmless man to ever lead a major TV series. But, who knows, maybe Apple has it on good authority that this is a formula for success. For us viewers, the algorithm remains a mystery.
