Here's How You Can Watch Every Season Of Numbers
One of the most reliable TV procedural premises is "someone with a non-law enforcement job helps an investigator solve crimes." There have been dozens of variations on this premise, with the job being everything from an author (Castle), to a so-called psychic (The Mentalist), to an actual psychic (Medium), to a magician (the short-lived Deception), to the Devil himself (Lucifer). One of the most all-time successful shows in this genre is Numbers (also known as Numb3rs), in which a math genius helps his FBI agent brother solve mysteries using mathematics.
Numbers ran for six seasons and 118 episodes on CBS between 2005 and 2010. It starred Rob Morrow as FBI Special Agent Don Eppes, the head of the Violent Crimes Squad in Los Angeles, and David Krumholtz as Charlie Eppes, a young math genius and professor of applied mathematics at the fictitious California Institute of Science. Don uses his brother as a consultant to help crack tough cases because Charlie can use mathematical modeling to find patterns and predict outcomes. In the pilot, for example, Charlie helps track down a serial rapist by doing mathematical analysis on the map of locations where he's committed crimes.
Every episode begins with voiceover from Charlie setting up the show's philosophy: "We all use math every day. To predict weather, to tell time, to handle money. Math is more than formulas and equations. It's logic; it's rationality. It's using your mind to solve the biggest mysteries we know."
However, if you miss Numbers — or never saw it when it was first on the air — how can you watch it today?
Hulu has 118 Numb3rs for you to bing3
It turns out that Numbers is, thankfully, very easy to revisit. The complete series is available to stream on Hulu.
Numbers was created by the husband and wife writing team of Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, and executive produced by Ridley and Tony Scott through their company Scott Free. Falacci and Heuton won the Carl Sagan Award for Public Appreciation of Science in 2005, for their show's contribution to helping the general public better understand complex mathematics (though a very enlightening and entertaining article by one of the show's math consultants details how the math depicted on the show is basically just slightly more accurate jargon than the nonsense the writers came up with).
In addition to Northern Exposure's Morrow and 10 Things I Hate About You's Krumholtz, the cast of Numb3rs included Judd Hirsch as Don and Charlie's father Alan, Peter MacNicol as Charlie's colleague Larry Fleinhardt, and Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan, Charlie's colleague/girlfriend and later wife. Many notable actors and TV personalities showed up throughout the procedural's run as guest stars, including Henry Winkler, Lou Diamond Phillips, Kathy Najimy, and Bill Nye.
The show's first season has a 53% "Rotten" critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but fans love it: that same season has an 86% "Fresh" audience score, and the overall show has a 92% "Fresh" audience score, as well.