THE recently concluded series from Apple TV+ Prime Target is an interesting amalgam of rebellion and conformity. 

The series, which makes great use of Cambridge and its environs, follows the trials and tribulations of, of all things, a maths genius, graduate student Edward Brooks who constructs complex equations in his head and notebooks the way most people jot down to-do lists. The first episodes of the eight-part series, though not skimping on the spy story aspect with murders aplenty, also refuses to skimp on the intellectual and abstract challenge surrounding these constructions, and so manages to do something most series wouldn’t even dare to attempt: it makes maths sexy. 

However, Brooks’s abstract obsession with prime numbers has a real world application. These equations are the key to an algorithm that can unlock global security and surveillance state secrets, rendering cybersecurity obsolete. 

He is pursued in his quest by an offshoot of the American National Security Agency (NSA) that is in league with a private company Axion which protects the transactions of the world’s banks. Brooks claims to be above these concerns and only interested in the abstract formula, but a rogue NSA agent Taylah Sanders is along to snap him out of his comfortable illusion and attempt to both keep him alive and keep his secret from falling into the wrong hands, which in this case are those of the NSA. 

Enter the most nefarious figure in the series, a ruthless NSA higher up — Andrew Carter — with the well-tailored suit and the appearance of bureaucratic efficiency even as he blithely orders a series of murders. Makes one recall in fiction the CIA agent in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and, in reality, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan in the last US administration, whose exquisitely made-up “compassion” rationalised a genocide and helped put the world on the brink of a nuclear confrontation. 

Besides the calculations, at one point filling the wall-to-wall whiteboard of a sealed room, the series as a spy series suggests that nothing and no-one is to be trusted as one associate after another betrays the duo. There is a violent Baghdad interlude and a suspenseful chase in the underground “chunnel” between France and England as Edward attempts to retrieve a hieroglyph that decodes the formula solved originally so many centuries ago in the flowering of Arab civilisation. 

One of the high points is in the penultimate episode where Edward’s abstract calculations are put into effect and instead of being used for national gain are used to help him and Taylah escape the clutches of the security state. 

There will be a second season and one of the best parts of the series is how it resolves the major issues of this first season, some involving a Cambridge dean played by Stephen Rea, while then moving the series into a different genre for season two, instead of simply spending the last few episodes as an extended tease for the next season as so many series do. 

The spy story in the second season will transmute into a fugitive-on-the-run narrative as Edward attempts to keep his secret out of the hands of the US security state who assured him that given the option to crack open global surveillance systems, they would do nothing with it. The second season then will follow a sometimes almost erased trail in television of the outsider hounded and pursued by government agencies that began resplendently with The Fugitive and then more furtively in shorter lived series such as Coronet Blue and Nowhere Man. It’s a grand, if now almost forgotten, or rather squelched, tradition. 

The question is why would the global corporation Apple sponsor a series which is so blatantly anti-corporate and anti-surveillance? 

There are a few answers. One is that very important to Apple TV production is its deal with Richard Plepler, the former head of HBO. Plepler left HBO when AT&T bought Warners and ordered the pay per view cable to become more “popular.” Indeed, while still pursuing quality productions (The White Lotus) the company now has more of a ’70s style movie “blockbuster” mentality with the gangster series The Penguin and the prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon. 

This opens up Apple to become the new HBO with more outside and prestigious fare such as Prime Target whose title suggests it is a combination of intellectualism and intrigue. 

Besides the branding though, there is also Apple’s advertising appeal in terms of its devices, its guarantee that its iPhone, Mac and iPad operate within an impregnable universe that keeps its users free of hackers and outside surveillance. What the company  doesn’t make so salient of course is that behind the wall, users are not free of Apple’s own spying on them and using their data, to the point where this year the company paid $95 million to settle a court case alleging it was listening to its users without their permission. 

So Apple too is part of the corporate and state surveillance network which the series rails against. 

The final “greenwashing” point is that Apple’s sponsorship of the series suggests the company itself is free of military industrial interference. In fact, the company’s fortunes are, at least in the past, intimately bound up with the “defence” department. One of Apple’s signature inventions, Siri, the voice that talks to all of us and that we talk back to, was funded and created by the ominous sounding DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (mocked by the Lost creators as the insidious Dharma Initiative). 

As of 2010, DARPA was still receiving half of the profits from the product. In fact, the US military was the institution that pioneered and took the investment risks for many of the inventions that resulted in the line of products that have made Apple one of the three most profitable companies in the world. 

So, cheers to Apple TV+ for investing in Prime Target but jeers for the privacy and military washing that still sustain the company and contribute to its brand. 

Prime Target is available on Apple TV+