tv

Prison Break…Part Deux!?

What can I say? Anyone who’s seen Prison Break has got to be wondering how the hell there’s going to be another series featuring the brothers…

Ah, Prison Break; it’s a shame this show didn’t come on the air a few years earlier. As a staple on Fox (a larger, more traditional network despite its left-of-center origins), it was often eclipsed by more progressive dramas airing on cable and premium channels. Still, Prison Break was one of those shows that lots of people watched…but never really talked about.  For the record, it was overall a pretty great show with some great characters, even if it did strain credulity a little near the end.

Note:  Some spoilers ahead.  I touch on some of the bigger plot points of the series, though I should add that the journey is the fun part of Prison Break.  Regardless, if you haven’t seen the entire series including The Final Break and plan to at some point, you may want to come back to this another time.

The first season was a mind-boggling web of puzzles, plans, wrenches thrown in these plans, and a bit of luck with a healthy dose of coincidence tossed in.  Remember the great suspense movies from the late 80’s and 90’s, and even a few from the very early 2000’s?  Back when suspense was its own genre, not quite as slow or brooding as a drama but not necessarily as horror-inclined as a thriller.  Seven, The Silence of the Lambs, L.A. Confidential, The Usual Suspects, Matchstick Men, Memento, Sleeping with the Enemy, Nick of Time, The Prestige….these are just a few I can rail off off the top of my head – movies that literally put you on the edge of your seat wondering what’s going to happen next.  That’s Season 1 of Prison Break, and in my opinion, its probably one of the best “first seasons” of television out there.  The whole thing could’ve stood on its own as a nice little miniseries, granted with a little of the fat trimmed.

Although the writers may have played their best card in Season 1 – the intricate escape plan – we were led into Season 2 with a strong cast.  There’s the vile T-Bag, an equal opportunity sexual predator to be feared by males and females, the young and the old, and the living and dead alike; the tormented genius in Michael who begins struggling with all the wrongs he’s committed to make a right; Sucre, the sympathetic romantic driven only by his love for his fiance and unborn child; and the oddly miscast Peter Stormare in the role of Italian mob boss “Abruzzi.”  Italian?  Really?  Stormare plainly retains his vaguely Nordic and/or Eastern European accent, and for god’s sake, he has blonde freakin’ hair!  Italian!? Couldn’t he just as easily have been Russian, or Ukrainian, or Chechen, with a surname like Kalashkinov, Karamazov, or Pushkin?

Anyway, Season 2 was a bit of a rollercoaster as more details about the Kafkaesque conspiracy emerge, though the disparate stories are quickly merged into one as many of the convicts end up looking for the money, as do ejected security guards Bellick and Geary and newcomer Agent Mahone.  It had its ups and downs, and I guess the writers figured it out, because in Season 3 the show went back to its namesake.

Season 3 finds us in a new prison, absent the safeguards, restraints, and bureaucracy of an American institution.  Here we have a whole new situation with a familiar cast of characters, albeit in different roles this time around.  It’s a little too neat and coincidental seeing so many of the major players end up in one place, yet not so contrived that it can’t be enjoyable.  It’s kind of fun watching guys who were on the “right” side of the law, like Bellick and Mahone, adjust and adapt to the prison and ally themselves with their nemesis Michael.  We see lots of shifting between protagonists and antagonists throughout the third season and even moreso in the fourth.

Now I wouldn’t quite call the fourth season of Prison Break impressive, and in fact some of it is downright illogical and implausible, but it is entertaining to once again watch familiar faces endlessly shift in their roles rather than inserting new characters to take their place.  Other shows ought to take note of this strategy: instead of writing out characters and trying to endear the audience to new ones, simply shift the allegiances and motivations of existing characters!  Season 4 attempts to combine the narrative complexity of twists and turns from the first season with a more action-oriented setting, yet again drawing from great suspense films.  The first handful of episodes are themselves much like a drawn out heist film, vaguely reminiscent of flicks like Heat, The Rock, Fast Five, and The Thomas Crown Affair. Think Ocean’s Eleven without the humor and ego-stroking.  The first third or so of the season wasn’t enthusiastically received, but I liked watching everyone get along (sort of) and splinter off and do their part to complete the mission.  Watching such a miss-matched team come up with and execute all these creative ways to get Scylla was an enjoyable extension of the typical heist formula.

However, with this task quickly completed, we once again watch the team fragment into unlikely configurations, notably with Link and Michael on seemingly opposite sides.  When you close off a series, whether it be after several seasons on television or a film franchise, one general rule is to “take it back to the beginning.”  Prison Break chooses to do this by introducing the brothers’ mother into the series who ends up creating a good deal of interpersonal drama between the brothers that so far hadn’t existed.  Honestly, the building up of Christina Scofield as Season 4’s villain was a little tiresome.  We’re kept interested by the flip-flopping perspectives of The Company that are given to us but with Christina at odds with the General, Michael at odds with everyone, Link working with/for the General, the wild cards Agent Self and Gretchen, and then everyone else in between, it gets a little too crazy at times.

Thankfully the writers wrap everything up quite neatly, and in just a nick of time if you ask me.  Too much more of this sprawling cast and endless plot twists to keep up with and I think even the most devout fans would’ve began to lose interest.  But there’s more: the real finale to Prison Break comes in the form of a TV movie.  It’s not a particularly strong piece – basically the ol’ crew reunites to break our Sarah – but it does close up all loose ends and give us a fitting finale to the show – Michael’s death.

The producers once said something to the effect of having “told all the stories that can be told” with these characters, and it would seem that they were thoroughly convinced of this when they killed off Michael.  So it begs the question: where the hell is a special “Prison Break 2” going to take place?  Or maybe a better question is when.  There’s no room to squeeze it in between the final “film” and Michael’s death, so they’re either going to have to retcon that particular seen or come up with something that takes place after Season 4’s conclusion but before Sarah’s imprisonment.  That still doesn’t leave a huge window of time open.  And even if they do invent some clever contrivance to fit within that small period of time, what’s going to happen?  Another literal “prison break”?  More shadow games and clashes with The Company?  I mean I kind of think the producers are right – all the stories have been told.

The best bet, in my mind anyway, seems to be putting the brothers (and hopefully at last a few of “the crew”) into a brand new situation a few years down the line….but Michael being six feet deep sort of precludes this approach.  Details were at first vague and suggested something like an all new TV series, but since then the idea seems to have settled as a “limited series.”  “Limited series” usually refers to things like reality shows where the “show” is basically the same from season to season but the cast changes; thus it isn’t contiguous.  Does this mean maybe a single season of “Prison Break 2”?  If so, that seems like a tough sell to a network.  However, “limited series” might also be modern-speak for the almost extinct “miniseries” format which reached its peak in the early 90’s and then swiftly died out by the end of the century.  Again, another hard sell – who the hell is going to air a miniseries in 2015?

Personally I wouldn’t mind a proper TV show if a reasonable premise could be conceived.  Prison Break may not have had the gravitas, realism, or innovation that propels so many current TV shows into the hearts and minds of millions, but it was a lot of fun and it never assumed that its audience was dumb.  Try as I might though, I can’t reconcile how anyone can squeeze anything out of what’s left of Prison Break’s timeline, at least not enough to fill more than a handful of episodes, and even then, I can’t imagine the writers mining anything different or more spectacular than what we’ve already seen.

So what do you think?  Have you heard any news that I haven’t about a successor to Prison Break?  What do you think would make an acceptable continuation to the story, and where exactly would it fall in the established timeline?

Written by The Cubist