The Proposal: 1#

Real life should be more like Numb3rs.

Okay, so ignore the use of l33t speak in the title, it’s not anyone’s fault a television show has a shitty name. It’s expected.

In case you don't know, Numbers is a show about two brothers- an FBI agent and a math prodigy. The math prodigy helps the FBI agent by applying real world math (oxy moron! ZING!) to catch criminals. They are assisted by a number of people with healthy dispositions.

It might not sound like it, but Numbers is the most saccharine show of television. And I like it. Damn it, saccharine me up. I think life should be more like Numbers. The girls/women are attractive, but not unattainably so, everyone lives out their wildest dreams (one dude went from homeless to astronaut in like ten episodes*), and everyone is suspiciously happy. And well adjusted. Nobody ever needs drugs, and if they need therapy it’s for something awesome like being an awesome FBI agent and shooting criminals for stealing the bread of starving children.

Even the foreign spies came back into the circle of Math/FBI badasses, after it being revealed that they were actually spying on China for the US, instead of China for the US (which is kind of a difficult mistake to make…).

The show is the ultimate merging of nerd loserdom and jock masculinity. Charlie would be a loser without his police connections, and Don would be dead without Charlie’s ability to do Maths stuff that probably doesn’t work in real life.

Please, make life more like Numbers.

If you can’t do that, then make life more an episode of Numb3rs. Instead of having to attend History lectures for three (or four should be you particularly lazy) years, just give us the Epps brothers discussing the theory through some obvious analogies. Then let us shoot people.

INT. EPPS FAMILY HOME

Everyone is sitting about looking annoyingly happy. Charlie and his father are eating cookies. The cookies are perfect and delicious. Don walks into the room with the black FBI agent. In Numbers the black character is non threatening and plays chess.

DON

Charlie we need your help. There’s been another attack on a Jewish person. Or a Jew. Is that racist?

EPP’S DAD

(smiling and being annoying supportive)

Wow sounds tricky, I have to go and not grieve over your mother who I never talk about. Then go and talk to that astronaut.

Charlie and Don sit down like good brothers. The black man does not surreptitiously examine goods in the household, because he is an honest FBI agent and not a criminal, which other shows may cast him as.

CHARLIE

Well, think that we could solve your case by contrasting the mitigating factors to the 19^th Century Dreyfus affair in France, a renowned case of anti-Semitism

The whole cast comes in and eats dinner together. They is lots of laughing, and nobody is mentioning the several passes the spy dude made at Don, because this is a happy world.

At this stage I’ll stop, lest you discover

a) I can’t write dialogue

b) I can’t remember anything else about the Dreyfus affair, other then it was anti-Semitic, and even that was a guess.

*May be an exaggeration.

Incestuous homosexual subtext? The writing's on the wall!

What's your poison? Tall dark and dreamy? Or less tall dark and dreamy?

In most cases this jacket would mean mid-life crisis, but such things do not exist in Numb3rs

One of the aforementioned female agents. She ranges from 'Gah' to 'I want to sing Springsteen to her'. The dude was like a fucking Navy Seal sniper, he was also a Chinese spy. Impressive, considering he does not look Chinese.