Reviewing Movies

Despite the preponderance of dreck on TV—even the venerable CBC is resorting to Survivor type programming—every now and then one encounters a program that rises above the norm to provide intellectual stimulation. This series with the “E” reversed to a 3, which is still running focuses on an FBI agent, his fellow investigators and his family. Although each episode features a crime investigation violence and death are not the focus here and despite the occasional car chases this is not an action series.

It is interesting to see the slacker of Northern Exposure, Rob Morrow, playing a driven FBI agent who, in spite of his 45 years, has managed to keep his figure and if anything has trimmed down. He has his own apartment, which we have yet to see, but spends most of his time at home of his widower Jewish father played by Judd Hirsh; who in this series plays much the same role he inhabited in Independence Day though here he has two sons. It is the younger brother, Charlie, a genius Cal Tech professor who supplies the unique hook for this series when he gets drawn into his brother’s cases to used applied mathematical theory to help solve the cases upon which his brother is working. This is the classic absentminded professor who must drive his grad student lecturers crazy when he forgets all else in zeroing in on near impossible to solve mathematical problems to the exclusion of all else. The small detail of how the FBI compensates him for his time is a detail that is not important here. This is a gifted young man so driven by his interests that he is absolutely blasé about the fact that he is on a first-name basis with the director of the NAS although his brother is incredulous that he’d neglect to mention such an important detail.

Although applied mathematics gets used in each episode it manages not to lose those of us who still have problems balancing our cheque books. The plots wisely centre on inter-personal relationships among a multi-racial cast and a lot of emphasis is placed on the Eppes family. A younger brother who still feels driven to prove himself to an older sibling; the similarity in nature between the two brothers, and the fact that both are so driven by their professions that they neglect the female relationships that are right under their noses. Papa Eppes would like to become a grandfather.