DVD Review: NUMB3RS The Third Season

If crime-solving shows aren’t your bag, you’re hard pressed to find much on television these days. In a world full of CSI and Law & Order and their various incarnations in different cities, it is fairly difficult for a new cop show to come on the scene and offer something new to its audience. NUMB3RS is able to give a fresh perspective by focusing on the importance of math. The show also allows enough focus on the personal lives and relationships between the characters that it isn’t just some formulaic way to solve a crime. But the character development doesn’t fall into the trap of being reminiscent of a soap opera, the drama is stuff that explains who the characters are as we already see them. And thankfully there aren’t the cookie-cutter one-liners being spouted horribly from characters we don’t really like that much anyway (David Caruso on CSI: Miami anyone?).

NUMB3RS is an FBI crime drama based in Los Angeles. But the LA in the show is more a reference than a location because it really could be happening in any city. The lack of pretty shots of the city help NUMB3RS maintain a more universal appeal. The show keeps it’s appeal for those who, like me, stopped taking math after high school by creating analogies about what the math is figuring out. The analogies aren’t the strength of the show and some of them are even quite boring, but they distract you enough from the equations being scribbled furiously that you think you understand exactly what is going on.

The Special Features for the third season of NUMB3RS are spread out over discs four, five and six. All the discs except for four have at least one episode with commentary available. Disc four has a featurette titled “Crunching NUMB3RS: Season 3” that looks at the importance the third season has for the series and the various ways the show changed. The fifth disc has a featurette called “Eppes Central” detailing the house used as the Eppes home and why they ultimately had to recreate the home on a sound stage. The final disc has two special features: a tour of the set house and a blooper reel.

Technically speaking, the DVD set has what you come to expect these days. It has a widescreen version enhanced for 16:9 televisions; the sound is Dolby Digital 5.1 English with Closed Captioning. The 24 episodes and special features are spread over six discs.

If you are a fan of the plethora of crime-solving dramas on television, NUMB3RS: The Third Season is worth adding to your collection. The show itself is worth giving a second look if you’re sick of all the forensic following franchises because it doesn’t have the same formulaic approach. Then for you Northern Exposure fans, Rob Morrow is one of the leads, playing FBI agent Don Eppes. Charlie Eppes is Don’s math whiz brother, played by David Krumholtz, and Judd Hirsch plays their father, Alan Eppes.