Need a distraction from the real world? Try a British conspiracy thriller and a Swedish satire
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As counterprogramming to the tragicomedy of our actual times, television will continue to offer other worlds and worldviews to inhabit. This week offers a couple of new series with a not entirely hopeless political bent, both premiering Wednesday — one a British conspiracy thriller with Gen Z heroes, the other a cheery Swedish satire based on an actual Cold War event. In neither does the United States play the hero.
“Prime Target” (Apple TV+) is not the musclebound secret agent romp its algorithmic title and opening scene — an explosion in Baghdad — suggest might be coming. Created by Steve Thompson (“Vienna Blood”), the series plays like an English, which is to say, a more naturalistic, evenly paced turn on an Indiana Jones or Dan Brown movie, as opposing parties scramble for legendary secret knowledge in exotic locations.
The MacGuffin at the center of “Prime Target” is a new theory of prime numbers — thus the series’ terrible title — that young math genius Edward Brooks (Leo Woodall), a Cambridge graduate student, is working toward, calculations certain parties would prefer he abandon and others would prefer he complete. (In that sense, he is the MacGuffin.)
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We know that Edward is a genius because we’re told he is; because he spends every spare moment scribbling equations on any available surface; and because he has poor people skills. (He is also handsome and athletic — we get an early glimpse of his chiseled torso — which will come in handy. And occasionally charming, despite himself, which will also come in handy.) That his scribbling should raise alarms with his thesis advisor, professor Robert Mallinder (David Morrissey), who attempts to dissuade the unpersuadable Edward from continuing, may puzzle you as much as it does him. But, as the official synopsis says, “finding a pattern in prime numbers … would allow him to access every computer in the world.” That prime numbers form the foundation of contemporary cryptography is something you can watch YouTube videos about, though it feels like some big revelation here.
Meanwhile! Young American Taylah Sanders (Quintessa Swindell, sparky with a touch of melancholy), is part of a small NSA unit disguised as students on a gap year, sharing a pad in lovely Cassis on the French Mediterranean. (Why Cassis, or wherever they actually filmed it? Because it’s lovely.) Taylah has a job surveilling secret video feeds of mathematicians, taking snapshots of their work just in case anyone might be inadvertently creating something dangerous, or useful, to American interests. I don’t want to say for a fact that the NSA doesn’t have a camera trained secretly on the whiteboard of, like, every mathematician in the world, because, who knows? It seems unlikely! But in this context, at least, as in most contemporary espionage stories, there are cameras everywhere, and it only takes some fast typing on a keyboard to get the picture you need — that is just how these tales get told now. (Taylah, of course, is a computer genius.)
Meanwhile! Mallinder’s wife, professor Andrea Lavin (Sidse Babett Knudsen, soulful) is excited to learn that the Baghdad blast mentioned above has opened an entrance to what she hopes might be Bayt al-Hikmah, the fabled 9th century House of Wisdom, “the greatest library ever created” and the center of medieval learning, thought destroyed. (I forget her specialty, exactly, but this chimes with it, and she’s determined to see it for herself.) More to the point, a lot of math was originated there, and Edward, having seen some pictures, believes it might contain exactly what he needs to finish his “prime finder.”
And that’s just the setup. Edward and Taylah will be thrown together and join forces. He’s a bit dreamy and naive, she’s focused and practical. There will be running and sneaking about in a variety of interesting locations. People will get killed. Martha Plimpton will arrive as Paris-based NSA chief Jane Torres, who also happens to be Taylah’s godmother. Shadowy organizations lurk in the shadows of other shadowier organizations. Edward’s beloved old mentor (Joseph Mydell) has Alzheimer’s. As this is a thriller, no one is to be trusted (as some characters will assert), and while some surprises in this regard are not all that surprising, just who is playing for what team, and what each team wants, can blur a little. It’s hard, too, to picture just where things will end up in any sort of satisfying way. That’s not an entirely bad thing, as it focuses you on what’s happening in the moment, which is generally pretty entertaining, and away from whatever is absurd or improbable in the plot.
Prime Video’s “Cross” and Peacock’s “The Day of the Jackal,” premiering Thursday, are cat-and-mouse stories, though exactly who is the cat and who the mouse is a revolving situation.
Basically, “Prime Target” is an engine to set two attractive young people on the run through a number of set pieces, interspersed with arguments about transparency and responsibility and whether there is such a thing as pure science in a dirty world. Intentionally or not, the story works as a metaphor for the creation of the atomic bomb, and the notion, expressly stated, that if you can’t stop a dangerous thing from being created, it’s better to get there first. (A “destroyer of worlds” reference calls back to Robert Oppenheimer, so, you know, probably intentional.)
The nuclear shadow is cast, but only lightly, over “Whiskey on the Rocks” (Hulu). “Whiskey” here refers to the class of Soviet submarine that ran aground off the coast of Sweden on Oct. 28, 1981. (Vodka, in this telling, was the culprit.) Creator Henrik Jansson-Schweizer has fashioned from this real-life minor international incident a whimsical satire, like “Dr. Strangelove” filtered through “The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming,” in which just such an event occurs — though apart from a droll pair of fishermen who serve as an unimpressed chorus, and the idea that it is better to be friendly than fight, the resemblance to that film ends there.
While the submarine crew grows restive and their captain lapses into a state of permanent inebriation, across three continents, politics roll on. Sweden’s sheep-farming, pipe-smoking, laid-back prime minister Thorbjörn Fälldin (Rolf Lassgård) finds himself having to manage a drunk, demented Leonid Brezhnev (Kestutis Stasys Jakstas) and a jelly-bean popping Ronald Reagan, who shoots skeet printed with Brezhnev’s face and wants to get into the act. It’s not a thriller — World War III did not start over this incident, though one character seems to wish it — but the story develops in a way that creates enough suspense to keep you watching. The very enjoyable heart of the comedy is the relationship between Fälldin and the Soviet ambassador in Sweden, Aleksandra Kosygina (Elsa Saisio), with whom he shares an interest in sheep and a phlegmatic temperament; together they quietly work toward a resolution. As a toast to diplomacy, rational thought and animal husbandry, “Whiskey” is what the world needs now — it did me some good, anyway.
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