Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.It’s only the third week of January, but Apple TV+ may have already given us one of the best and worst series of 2025. Days after scaling new heights with Severance’s second season, the streamer serves up a show that feels scraped out from the bottom of the content barrel.A formulaic eight-part thriller, Prime Target revolves around an outstanding but standoffish Cambridge postgrad mathematician called Edward, whose esoteric research into prime numbers sequences inadvertently gives him the tools to access any computer and control the entire digital world. This, predictably, makes him a man much of interest to the American National Security Agency — and more sinister organisations, too.Edward’s beautiful mind is given a telegenic face in the form of Leo Woodall: the rising British star whose career so far has been built on a couple of turns as a rakish charmer (HBO’s The White Lotus, Netflix’s One Day). Captivating in those breakout roles, he is badly miscast here as the unlikely, largely unlikeable hero. He is unconvincing and visibly uncomfortable in a role that requires him to don a tweed jacket, wear a dour expression and mumble through lines of awkward exposition and inane dialogue. “Numbers are everywhere,” Edward declares solemnly at one point, like an oddly gloomy pre-school TV presenter.The overly earnest script works against what is at its core a mindless globe-hopping conspiracy yarn. The first few episodes move us from Cambridge — where academics are being mysteriously picked off — to Baghdad, where an ancient library has been unearthed. Next is the Cote d’Azur, where NSA agent Taylah (Quintessa Swindell) is based, presumably because it was a nice place to film. Given that her job largely involves remotely surveilling the world’s “maths nerds”, there are several scenes that require us to watch someone statically watching people.The pace does eventually pick up once Taylah arrives in England to protect Edward from whoever’s trying to get their hands on his precious numbers. There are perhaps enough cliffhangers here to entice some viewers to keep watching but most will probably move on to the next thing. After all, you don’t need to be a brilliant mathematician to work out that clunky writing, flat characters and a flimsy story don’t add up to much.★★☆☆☆Episodes 1 & 2 on Apple TV+. New episodes released weekly
