Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3975 in DVD
• Brand: PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO
• Released on: 2006-05-30
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 4
• Dimensions: .70 pounds
• Running time: 544 minutes

Album Description
FBI Special Agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) recruits his mathematical genius brother Charlie (David Krumholtz) to help the Bureau solve a wide range of challenging crimes in Los Angeles. The two brothers take on the most confounding criminal cases from a very distinctive perspective. Dr. Larry Fleinhardt (Peter MacNicol) is Charlie's friend and colleague who urges Charlie to focus more on his university studies than on FBI business. Don and Charlie's father, Alan Eppes (Judd Hirsch), is pleased to see his two sons working together, but fears their competitive nature will lead to trouble.

Amazon.com
"Everything is numbers," states Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) in the pilot of Numb3rs, a satisfying (and educational!) new crime drama. Executive-produced by brothers/film directors Ridley Scott (Gladiator) and Tony Scott (Top Gun), it's like CSI with algorithms and probabilities instead of blood spatter and DNA swabs, which separates it from the slew of gruesome forensics-centered cop shows currently on the air. In this case, it's a brains-vs.-brawn matchup: a brilliant math professor (Krumholtz) consulting on crimes for an FBI agent (Rob Morrow) who happens to be his older brother. While Don, Morrow's character, busts the baddies with his team of agents, Charlie's scribbling formulas on chalkboards and statistically deducting a rapist's next target by comparing his pattern to a sprinkler system. (Yes, it sounds geekier than it is). As the show progresses, Charlie--not yet desensitized to people's fates relying on his findings--takes it harder and harder when his hypotheses don't always result in justice. It sounds very cerebral, but the cops and robbers concept plus brother-to-brother dynamics make it all go down easy. There's an unpretentious way the premise is executed, which ends up making math--get this--fun.

The DVD set features episode commentary by cast and crew, and a peek at the unaired pilot that starred many different actors (including Anna Deveare Smith and Michael Rooker) who were dropped when the episode was overhauled. Morrow, who wasn't even in the pilot, was cast later with Judd Hirsch as their father to replace the original (blonder) actors because, as producers admitted, casting Krumholtz as Charlie took the family in an "ethnically specific direction." The jokes also abound in a behind-the-scenes featurette, where Morrow defines the series as "Rain Man … plus an extra Jew." --Ellen A. Kim

From the back cover
We all use mathematics every day... but in a world of body counts, multiple criminal masterminds, and percentages involving perpetrators who may act again, figures are especially valuable. This is a world of NUMB3RS. Rob Morrow is Don Eppes, an FBI agent who recruits his mathematically gifted brother Charlie (David Krumholtz) to help the Bureau solve a wide range of challenging crimes in Los Angeles--thus tackling the most baffling criminal cases from two very distinctive perspectives. This dynamic series depicts how the convergence of police work and mathematics provides unexpected revelations and answers to the most perplexing criminal questions. Enjoy all 13 compelling Season One episodes of NUMB3RS in this premiere four-disc DVD collection.

Customer Reviews

Numb3rs is a Great Show
I was lucky enough to catch Numb3rs from the beginning. I absolutely love the show. First, it is different than your standard cop show, and even different from all the CSI type shows. The show has strong characters and you really feel like you know them. The FBI is portrayed as actually being human rather than a federal conglomerate. The tie in with the math is simply awesome. I am not a huge math guy, but it is interesting for me, and the show does a good job of explaining the math via great scenes. I give this 5 stars.

"We All Use Math Everyday"
"We all use math everyday" says Charlie Eppes, the lead character in the CBS mathematical drama NUMB3RS. Trying to convince an 8th grade math class about that became easier with this show on the air. I've enjoyed the show since day one. Crime drama that makes you think.

Teachers out there may not be aware that the show has a web site that offers lessons based on each episode. Upper level middle and high school students can be challenged by these activities created with help from Texas Instruments and The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. I am pleased to say some of the authors also participated in the Rutgers Leadership Program in Discrete Mathematics, a course I had the pleasure of taking way back in 1996. Check out the NUMB3RS website at
http://www.cbs.com/primetime/numb3rs/

It All Adds Up
Yes, this is a great TV show--and I don't say this lightly. I'm not much of a TV watcher generally speaking, but "Numb3rs" has really impressed me as a quality show from the get-go. My spouse and I always make it a point to be home Friday night to catch the latest episode, so we were both pretty excited that season one has been released on DVD. Since we don't have cable, and surrounding high-rise buildings hinder antenna reception (ah, yes, life in the big city), it has been especially nice to see the episodes again, only this time in clear and crisp digital.

So what makes this show so good? Lots of things, I suppose. I particularly like the combination of Charlie and Don as a crime-fighting team, their skills and personalities complimenting each other. With Charlie you get the latest incarnation of the classic figure of the detective who uses reason and logic to solve the crime (going all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin in "The Purloined Letter" not to mention Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes), and with Don you of course get the cop with a badge and a gun who saves the day (a mainstay of American TV for decades). That said, both actors flesh these archetypes out really well into individual characters, and their brotherly interaction (with a dash of sibling rivalry) creates just the right dynamic.

The math angle is handled extremely well, too. My spouse the mathematician assures me that the higher math Charlie spouts is for real (even if it can't quite catch the bad guys quite so efficiently--cue temporary suspension of disbelief here), and yet for a humanities type like me who knows just enough math to unbalance the checkbook the show's writers and producers do a fine job of translating such mathematics into terms that make sense to the non-expert, often using visual asides to illustrate the principles involved in clever, creative ways. In general, too, the atmosphere and character of academia (with Charlie's physicist friend and all) is portrayed pretty accurately and authentically, which is extremely rare for TV shows...and movies, for that matter.

Finally, on the more basic level, there is just the good old-fashioned pure enjoyment of watching the good guys catch the bad guys.

To make a long story short (I know, too late), this is a fine TV show that is well worth having in one's collection of DVDs.