Pop CSI: How Science Conquered TV

But let´s be clear: Television dramas aren´t after documentarian accuracy. They´re after verisimilitude. Science documentaries strive for total accuracy yet have a tiny fraction of the viewership of prime-time dramas. The dramas command vast audiences because, above all, they tell compelling stories.

Black does not, therefore, dictate real-world math to the Numb3rs writers for them to type up as a reporter might. Rather, the writers-hired for their creative chops-decide where they need math for story purposes. This makes Black´s job in some ways harder than the mathematicians´ whose results he simulates. He must reverse-engineer math to meet the story´s needs while maintaining the credibility of verisimilitude.

Emblazon it in lights on the marquee-the order of all things Hollywood is: Story first, Story first, Story first. It´s true on all science shows, even House, where the medical mystery figures so prominently. Writers typically begin with a character or emotional arc. Then they look for a good malady. It can require extensive research to find a slice of science that fits a story like a puzzle piece. Sometimes you have to jam it in.

And so, for all the efforts of researchers like Andy Black and the M.D. writers, for all the producers´ insistence that the science be accurate-a sincere insistence, I believe-â€scientific accuracy†is a protean term in dramatic television. Some things get fudged, a lot gets foreshortened. And sometimes they nail it on the head.

MATH + SEXINESS = !!!!

In every episode of Numb3rs, genius mathematician Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz) helps his FBI-agent brother Don (Rob Morrow) catch a criminal. Usually it´s a serial robber, rapist or murderer who´s about to strike again. Don, at an impasse, asks Charlie if he has any mathematical solutions. This being episodic television, Charlie always does. He covers his board with equations (enter Andy Black, before the cameras roll, chalk in hand). In the end, Black says, â€the criminal is straitjacketed by Charlie because math is persuasive and final.â€

Wife/husband team Cheryl Heuton and Nick Falacci created Numb3rs after years of selling movie scripts that were never made. â€The moment I knew this could work was in the summer of 2002, when we were on vacation in Maui,†Heuton says. â€I was reading Michael Frayn´s play Copenhagen, which I found both intellectually rigorous and incredibly moving. I thought that if Frayn could make a conversation between two physicists more than half a century ago so powerful, surely we could manage a compelling TV show built around a mathematician in the far more commercially accessible world of TV crime-solving.â€