Fall TV Friday – 2005 – Prison Break
Prison Break – FOX – 4 Seasons (81 Episodes) – USA
In October 2009 I decided to take a look back at the new shows that debuted during the Fall of 2005. These are their stories.
In 2005 only ten of the 31 new shows to debut survived their first season. Of those ten Close To Home and The War At Home didn’t survive their second. The remaining eight all made it through their third season and while Ghost Whisperer, How I Met Your Mother, Criminal Minds, Bones and Supernatural are all still on the air three shows weren’t lucky enough to make it past season number four.
Everybody Hates Chris got dumped when The CW stopped caring about black people to focus exclusively on white teenage girls. My Name Is Earl got shuffled off by NBC who part way through 2009 just started flailing their arms around wildly and hoping for the best. Whilst over on FOX Prison Break came to its end after four relatively successful seasons. Unlike fans of My Name Is Earl who got to left on a cliff-hanger, Prison Break fans got all the loose ends tied up.
Or so I hear anyway, to be honest I’ve only ever seen the pilot of Prison Break. The DVD copy somebody lent me crapped out three minutes into the second episode. So if you’re out there and reading this, now you know what to get me for Christmas: better friends who take care of their DVDs properly.
Prison Break follows the story of stone faced handsome chap Michael Scofield played by the guy who turned up as a dead soldier in the pilot of Ghost Whisperer. Michael has gone and got himself arrested ON PURPOSE so that he can get locked up in a maximum security prison, where his brother is currently on death row for killing the Vice President’s brother. His brother’s name is Lincoln and in one of the worst bits of dialogue is described as another inmate as “Linc the Sink – in that he’ll come at you with everything but the kitchen…”
Linc doesn’t just have a head that looks like a block of cheese he’s also innocent, to boot. You couldn’t make a show about a guy saving his brother from death row if his brother was guilty. What would be noble about that? That would just be something that scoundrels do. We need to two incredibly noble, incredibly innocent, incredibly handsome prisoners who can band together and fight against injustice, slimy government agents, and Russian mobsters to find freedom.
The Prison Break pilot is directed by local douchebag, Brett Ratner. Ratner’s hacky fingers are all over the thing. Sure it looks great with sweeping shots of the prison, and moody interiors, but every Brett Ratner movie looks great from Rush Hour to The Family Man to Rush Hour 2 to Red Dragon to Rush Hour 3. The guy just spends so much time trying to be cool that he forgets to create characters anybody cares about.
The biggest problem with the pilot is that it would appear the only research into prisons these guys have done is to rent The Shawshank Redemption. Shawshank is a fantastic movie, but when you start calling the new prisoners ‘fish’, you have an old dude who has a pet cat instead of a crow, you have a guy who can get you anything you need, and you have the only innocent man in prison plotting a breakout you can’t help but think back to Andy Dufresne and Red which of course only reminds you that Prison Break pales in comparison to that masterpiece.
Rattner’s lucky he managed to line himself up a charismatic cast in Wenthworth Miller as Michael and Dominic Purcell as Linc. Purcell, you probably won’t remember, was the guy who hunted down the giant crocodile in Primeval. Although to be honest you’re more likely to recognize him the other way around. You sit down to watch Primeval and say “hey it’s the guy from Prison Break.” I don’t think anybody has ever used the words “Hey, it’s the guy from Primeval.”
Joining those two in the cast you have a whole bunch of genuine ‘hey it’s that guy!’ people including Paul Adelstein who would go on to star in Private Practice. Peter Stormare who plays the crazy guy in everything and plays the crazy guy in this. Jessalyn Gilsig shows up because after Boston Public, Heroes, Friday Night Lights and Glee her mission is to appear in everything. Even Conrad Hilton from Mad Men pops up as a Bishop who is quickly killed off in the pilot. Rounding out the cast is Robin Tunney who I haven’t liked since she shaved her head in Empire Records and watched her dad fall to his death in Vertical Limits.
The writing in the first episode creaks along with dialogue like “You’ve got a look about you like all you did was turn the wrong way up a one way street.” “Everybody turns up one sooner or later” and the scene where Michael gets shown all the different gangs in the prison yard like he’s Joseph Gordon Levitt at the start of 10 Things I Hate About You.
The premise of ‘brother gets himself locked up so he can work to break his brother out of prison’ is a clever one. Everybody loves a good breakout and providing audiences with a season long set up to an eventual break out is a fantastic hook. Then again solving a murder mystery by having each episode be a year in the lives of your main characters is also a pretty clever premise but Reunion really sucked. Prison Break doesn’t suck, its way too serious and it rips off Shawshank Redemption so many times that it’s nearly unforgiveable, but it doesn’t suck.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright
