61: Prison Break

Prison Break, my friends, is a tale of the potential problems with serial TV. In fact, Prison Break itself sat on the shelf until the rise of serial TV, mostly at the hands of Lost and 24, when Fox decided to ride the trend and found it sitting on the back burner. It was a brilliant idea for serial show - a man's brother is framed and put into prison for a crime he didn't commit - the man must have himself incarcerated in the prison for the sole person of breaking his brother out. It's compelling, and what on earth can be more exciting than a prison break and fighting for the innocence of a wrongly convicted man when everyone's out to get them? (Why do you think the Fugitive was so successful?) Audiences thought so also - turning out in droves, initially, anyway.

The problem with serial TV is this - you have an initial premise, and that's great - trying to get out of prison. And if you know it's going to be a certain amount of time - like a miniseries, or one of those british series with six episodes - you can plan for that - you have four hours in which to work out your plot from start to finish, more or less and work from there. But when you're making American TV, if people like it - studios want to make more of it, more sequels, more seasons, whatever. Basically, the choice your faced with is, do you drag out the show and make it potentially take five incredibly dull and slow seasons to break out of prison, or do you break out after the first few episodes, or first season, and realize that the whole reason d'etre of the show is finished with, and you have to invent something else compelling, that will likely seem hackneyed or forced if you can think of something good enough. Plus, never knowing when you're going to be cancelled, you want to always be in a position to end it. In addition from the resolution of the main plot, you have another potential complication. In shows like this, you want to be able to kill characters off, and make other major plot-affecting decisions - but once you make those decisions, if you have to go on for seasons after, it can be very limiting - if you've already killed off a character, you might wish you hadn't after you realize there's more than three episodes left and you could really use him back.

Prison Break suffered this fate. It was originally planned as a 14 part miniseries, until Fox decided they want a series. They had originally planned the series for 13 episodes - when people liked it, 9 more were ordered, leading to them to make the first season finish with the brothers and others escape from prison. Then of course the next season was a grand Fugitive-style chase from federal agents (including my East Meadow hometown native William Fichtner), followed again by a year attempting to get out of a new and different prison. After the first season, the second season remained strong, but as seem to happen often in these serial shows, by the third season viewer interest was clearly waning - I don't know why exactly, but maybe being caught in a second prison seemed repetitive. Anyway, they got one more season that drew even worse raitings, and that was about it. But frankly, in my mind, that's impressive - a show built on a simple premise, that was used up by the end of the first season manages to go on for four years - worth applauding in and off itself.

I long debated watching Prison Break and maybe I will one day. Until then it will have to make do with appearing on this prestigious list.