NUMB3RS - the most 'intelligent' crime show on television today

Blackraven · 07-11-2009, 01:56 PM

Interesting that this show was airing on two different TV channels here at the same time @ 2am-3am Philippine time (season 2 was airing on Fox Crime Asia; season 5 was airing on AXN Asia).

With that said, damn, I can't wait for season 6 to be shown here on TV (starts next week for us here).

P.S.
So who here watches the show?

too sexy for this club · 07-11-2009, 02:42 PM

a lot of the statistical component of the show is bullshit; for instance, there's an episode where he has to deal with a classification problem and cites an error rate even though he has no training set and this should consequently be impossible

that said, that really just makes it like house for math, which isn't a horrid thing

Ribos · 07-11-2009, 07:02 PM

Too much of the show reeks of the "What the Bleep Do We Know" bullshit, i.e. the show generally goes "through math, we can find this out!" regardless of what "math" actually means here. Problems are much better at falling under "suspension of disbelief" than solutions, and whereas House came up with bizarre/absurd medical conundrums to solve, Numb3rs uses real-life crimes and then hand-waves away the solutions.

It's really no more "intelligent" than all the CSI type shows, where the forensics lab is capable of coming up with anything they need to solve a crime. Frankly, I actually find those kinds of shows insulting to my intelligence, where the directors/producers think they can just pass their bullshit off as "too smart for the audience to understand."

The big lesson these companies need to learn is that Science =/= magic.

too sexy for this club · 07-11-2009, 08:36 PM

incidentally a large number of forensic tests are underpowered and are believed to yield what would normally be an unacceptably high error rate (handwavy language, but it's not like you can know the truth so easily)

and no matter how much of a math genius you are, if your dataset is insufficient there is really not much you can do about it other than (somewhat) educated guessing which should not be used to convict people

but i assume this is why "intelligent" is in quotes

**helix eternal** · 07-13-2009, 09:16 PM

I used to watch this, along with a number of other crime dramas like CSI, CSI: Miami, Law & Order, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, NCIS, and Without a Trace. (Somehow I wrote those in alphabetical order without even thinking about it.)
Anyway, my favorites were probably L&O: CI, CSI: Miami, and Without a Trace, but all the shows started running together eventually because they all have similar stories and get resolved in similar manners, just with different methods.
It's like they had a big pile of crime drama cookie dough and they whipped out the big box of cookie cutters to come up with the different ideas.

Fred 00 · 07-17-2009, 03:17 PM

guys, we can use algorithms to......
/\
| pretty much every episode

kannazuki · 07-17-2009, 05:20 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fred 00

guys, we can use algorithms to......
/\
| pretty much every episode

This pretty much explains each every episode. It gets interesting for the first few episodes then it gets tedious.

Admittedly on the chalkboard, the equations tend to be right but the show seems to be more interested in throwing out mathematical jargon to make everything sound impressive rather than having the maths of it right.