Prison Break S1

Rating: M – Suitable for a mature audience 16 years and older.
Duration: Aprox. 45 minutes/episode
Genre: Television Drama.
Actors: Stacy Keach, Peter Stormare, Robin Tunney, Dominic Purcell, Robert Knepper, Marshall Allman, Wade Williams, Paul Adelstein, Amaury Nolasco, Sarah Wayne Callies, Wentworth Miller.
Release Date: Available Now.

Prison Break had a lot going for it, but then it went too far. And this seems to be a problem with American TV of recent years, with a host of new, big concept TV shows that have been coming out, turning into hits and being milked for many seasons to come.

Prison Break started out well. An interesting concept, that even though it was full of plot holes and required huge stretches of believability, it was riveting TV. Written in fact with near perfection for the TV minded viewer. At the end of every forty-minute episode was a real cliff-hanger, an edge of your seats event that had you desperate to see the next episode.

But it was setting a pace, and a plot that couldn’t be maintained for it’s 22 episode season and eventually imploded with the weight of it’s own over-inflated ego.

Then there was the darkness. Prison Break starts out as a bright happy programme that has a flicker of light at the end of the tunnel, a candle of hope burning that could be reached at the end of the season. But that hope quickly gets snuffed out when you realise, just after the half waypoint that the writers are going to do everything within their powers to milk the plot for all it’s worth. You know that there’s not going to be a happy ending, and with the body count and destroyed lives climbing higher than Everest, you start to wonder what the point of the whole thing is.

And then they treat you like idiots. In the later half of the season, the writers feel the need to explain every situation through mini-flashbacks. He’s doing this, because this happened two episodes back. This might be nice if you’ve only just started watching, but for the loyal fans who started at the beginning, and have watched every episode, re-arranging their television viewing to accommodate Prison Break, it’s like a slap in the face with a rotten banana skin.

Maybe it’s just me, but some of these big concept, 22 episode television series would be much better as a standalone, 12 episode mini-series. Anything that runs for more than one season needs to be constructed along the lines of Firefly, a series that had a bigger picture, but was basically a series of independent stories that could be viewed independently, but worked together as a series.

Food for thought:
Every action has a consequence, but how many people care about such consequences?

Rent or Buy?
Renting a 22 episode series is a bit of an ask, but to be honest if you want a prison drama buy The Shawshank Redemption.