From 2005 to 2010, CBS ran six seasons of a show that made math cool again. Now, just as Netflix has pulled Numb3rs from streaming, audiences everywhere can purchase the complete six seasons on DVD from CBS/Paramount Pictures. As brothers, FBI agent Don (Rob Morrow) and mathematics professor Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) might be mismatched, but together, they form a crack team that stops a variety of criminals thanks to their use of mathematics and probability.
Joining the main cast are Alimi Ballard as Don’s righthand man David Sinclair, Sabrina Lloyd as profiler Terry Blake, Peter MacNicol as Dr. Larry Fleinhardt, Navi Rawat as Amita Ramanujan, but what the cast did since then is more amazing. While Morrow has not had another star turn since the show, and Krumholtz seems to have gained more coverage for his weight gain than his roles, Judd Hirsch, who plays patriarch Alan Eppes, has gone on to the supremely comic Superior Donuts. Even so, the list of guest stars across the board include a host of stars we already knew, like Will Patton, Wendell Pierce, Keith Carradine, Henry Winkler, Christopher Lloyd, Ray Wise, and Neil Patrick Harris, and those whose stars keep climbing, like Shawn Hatosy, Tony Hale, Colin Hanks, Jay Baruchel, Josh Gad, William Mapother, Tom Pelphrey, Jon Hamm, and Morena Baccarin.
In 118 episodes in this Complete Series collection, the audience sees the dramatic turns that the lives of the Eppes family makes. When we begin, the two brothers and their father are single, living in California; six years later, big changes have occurred, thanks to their professional and personal dynamics. Thanks to the collection, fans can explore each of their favorite episodes and a host of special features included.
In its idiosyncracies, Numb3rs highlights math… and family. The Eppes family, father and two sons, lets the audience in to see the grief of loss, the development of relationships, and the exploration (and restructuring) of family. It’s not easy, but it is doable. And these guys will do it by the numbers.
On the set including the first four seasons, a few of the special features stand out. “Crunching Numb3rs” looks at the first three seasons, while the unaired pilot (the order skips the episode that should’ve been numbered two) gets featured in “Point of Origin: Inside the Unaired Pilot” and “Do the Math” explores Caltech. Audition reels for some of the cast, with casting director Mark Saks’ commentary, are also included. Krumholtz takes us behind the scenes, as does creator Nicolas Falaci in another feature. For a show that plays it seriously straight, the blooper reels highlight a different side.
On the set containing the fifth and sixth seasons, the “Crunching Numb3rs” from the first set is revisited for season five. There’s a celebration of the one-hundredth episode and a look at how the show has grown in “Coming Full Circle.” The women of Numb3rs get their own shot, as does the cinematography in “Pixel Perfect.” Several deleted scenes and audio commentaries join the final set’s blooper reel.
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