Prison Break, the early entrant for the new season, is a tale of two schemes. One is a conspiracy that put an apparently innocent man on death row for the murder of the vice president’s brother. The other is the convict’s brother’s scheme to get him out of prison by getting into prison and then breaking them both out.
The motivation for the viewer to watch is to see the details of both schemes exposed. The big secret of the conspiracy is “why?”; for the escape, the question is “how?”, and we see the many odd things that the brother does which help build a picture of a very ornate escape scheme. These things have to drive the interest, because in order to keep the surprises surprising, the central characer needs to remain an enigma. As such, despite time spent with various side stories looking at how other people are involved in these schemes, there is no real human concern and no one to root for.
It is fairly common these days to bring a successful movie director in for the pilot, and this is no exception. Alas, they brought in someone successful but not good. Brett Ratner has a track record of films that are less than the some of their parts. They have good core concepts and good casts, but in the Rush Hour films and elsewhere, he shows a lack of concern for plot and storytelling. That same inability to add the pieces together strikes here. Watching this, I ended up with a mild curiousity of how the storytellers would tell the story. This is quite different from actually being emotionally involved in a story, reacting to it as the truth. Everything about this pilot made at least this viewer feel fistanced from all that is going on.
Still, within its problems, smoothly made. Certaily, there is an audience for this, and I will probably continue to watch it until I no longer care what the escape plan is and why it seems so complicated.
As I was watching this last night (and of course I have my old pet peeve of two individual hour long installments of a series being presented as a two hour episode), I was wondering how long is this series expected to last. Is it planned for a finite number of episodes with the escape being accomplished and the conspiracy being found out? Or will it just go on indefinitely (assuming it’s not cancelled)? Surely the date established for the execution will be a factor, or will the brother be given some kind of reprieve?
The publicity that Fox put out certainly suggests that the prison break itself will not be the end of things… which makes sense, because then you still have fugitives possibly seeking to clear their names, to find the modern equivalent of the one-armed man.
It used to be they really had a two-hour episode to start things, because the pilot would be made to use as a telemovie if the series was not picked up. Now, they want the big launch, but presumably don’t want a real two-hour episode as that doesn’t settle well in rerun packages.
Given that as of right now it looks like only 2.5 Men conflicts in the time slot, I’ll probably continue to watch this one while taping the half-hour of “Men”—only because I usually prefer to watch the shorter of two conflicting shows on tape delay. Good questions, Michael. I wonder myself how long it will take to get to the actual “Prison Break” part this season and then how much time will be spent on the run?…
Also, would the high profile convicted-and-sentenced-to-die-in-30-days killer of the VP’s brother really be allowed to participate in an internal prison work program with other general population prisoners? And would he be given chapel attendance privileges (albeit in shackles, but again with non-death row inmates)? I don’t think so, but never having been incarcerated I could, of course, be wrong.
All in all, I thought PB was very 24-like (which I know is by design) in style and plausibility. As long as I can shut down certain portions of my brain (always dangerous as I use so little to begin with!) and not think too much about certain elements I’ll be able to enjoy it. It could be good “escapist” (
)entertainment.
24 at least lends itself to somewhat plausibly (and I use that term loosely) resetting each season’s scenario back to some unfolding terrorist scheme which Jack has to foil. (How believably they can do it this upcoming season now that Jack’s “dead” remains to be seen.) I don’t see how the producers of this show could believably set up a PB for each season (assuming renewal). I kind of look for the actual escape to be in the season finale and then they can spend subsequent seasons a la The Fugitive trying to unravel the murder/conspiracy mystery while staying on the run.
Oh, two cast-related question I’m curious about…
Isn’t the death row brother the guy who played the lead in FOX’s failed John Doe series? I only watched the pilot of that show at the time and I hated it so much I never once bothered to sample it after that. Talk about unbelievable!? I never even began to care one little bit about the mystery of John Doe’s real identity/story. But I digress…
I noticed a Jessalyn Gilsig credited. I’m sure she was the one playing the death row brother’s (ex-?) wife (apparently “Lisa”). I’m probably nuts, but I could have sworn that in the early days of Boston Public, there was a “Joslyn (sp?) Gilseg” playing teacher Lauren Davis. I’m usually reasonably good with remembering names (and spellings) of actresses who catch my eye, but imdb credits her exactly as on PB. At first, I thought it must be a sister, but now I’m convinced it’s actually her. Oh, the question… I guess the question is “Am I nuts or does anyone else recall her ‘alternative’ credit on BP?” Yeah, that’s what I figured—OK, off to my rubber room…
According to this SciFiWire item posted this morning the premiere episode of the WB’s new series Supernatural will run long…
“The debut episode of Supernatural will air at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sept. 13 and will end at 10:07 p.m.”
Yeah, it has nothing to do with PB, but I just thought I’d toss the heads-up in here for what it’s worth…
OK, THIS SciFiWire item?
(No idea why the link didn’t work in the comment immediately above, but trying it again. Also, Nat, I see you commented WHILE I was in the midst of my lengthy main PB comment, so you brought up some stuff that I also did before I realized.)
Thanks for reminding me about the death row guy being treated like any other inmate. Now, I’m no expert on prison life (I admit all I know comes from TV and movies), but that really was a stretch. I only hope that the balance between the action/plotting and these (perhaps necessary) departures from reality don’t make the show as ridiculous as 24 becomes.
Hey, Nat! No review of Rome? Or should I be remembering that perhaps you don’t follow HBO?
It should be noted that the show is set in Illinois — where, in reality, the state currently has a moratorium on execution. You can get the death penalty, but you won’t get killed until they figure out how to stop killing the innocent or give up trying.
As for Rome: I don’t have any of the pay cable channels at this point. I find it a lot cheaper to catch their programming via Netflix once it’s out on DVD. (Currently zooming through season 2 of The Wire; constructed very much like a novel in mostly good ways, this show benefits from being watched over a shorter period of time.)
Yeah, I think there is a high strain of ridiculous in Prison Break (a silly level of complexity, really), but they manage to treat it with relative seriousness. 24… well, I shouldn’t comment. My last episode of 24 was season 2, episode 1. I just didn’t want to watch those people go through that all again!
Actually, a couple of things on this thread lead to another point. For years, the emphasis has been on making TV drama episodes very, well, episodic, because that works the best with syndication (where you can’t count on people watching every episode, it’s much more “grazing” TV than appointment TV.) But with sales of TV series on DVD growing quickly, things might change — TV on DVD loves the longer story. Practically begs for it.
To answer my own question, yes, Dominic Purcell was John Doe. (I had time now–which I didn’t have earlier–to Google/imdb him.) It wasn’t that I disliked him at the time, I just really did not love the completely unbelievable (IMO) premise or how they treated it. Even though I only watched the pilot in full I did pass by it channel surfing once in a while and it never took long for his character to say something completely ridiculous and make me switch. It usually involved him knowing some completely useless trivial “fact” and then extrapolating some specific conclusion from a general statistical trend. It just didn’t make any sense.
As for episodic TV, I consider House to be almost textbook. I’ve been enjoying the reruns which are new to me since I was watching Veronica in that slot last season. I see there were some minor continuing plot lines later in the season, but for the most part, the fact that FOX may not be showing every single season 1 episode (and not necessarily in sequence) does not really trouble me. On the other hand, I’m still miffed at UPN for not showing every VM episode. Still looking forward to season 2 though.
I’ve wondered the same thing if the “continuing saga” stories a la 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, and to a lesser extent “Buffy,” et al, might become more common for the sake of future DVD sales.
So back to PB I’m glad it wasn’t only me who questioned the mixing of the death row guy and the general inmate population. I didn’t know Illinois wasn’t a death penalty state, but I can probably overlook that little discontinuity from reality. I suspect there will be far bigger blips to come on the PB non-reality radar.