"Prison Break" is a FOX drama that ran for five seasons. I watched the first one, and will not be watching any of the others. It's not a bad show, but I'm definitely not the right audience for this one. After many years of enjoying prestige crime dramas with much higher budgets and more resources, a pulpy, melodramatic prime time network show from 2005 simply doesn't work for me the way I want it to.
There's plenty to like about "Prison Break," and the first season lives up to its reputation as a thrill ride. Each of the 22 episodes follows Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) in the fictional Fox River State Penitentiary, as he works to bust his wrongly convicted brother Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) out of the joint before he's executed. The cast is a bonanza of character actors, including Peter Stormare, Stacy Keach, and a young Frank Grillo. Other standouts include Amaury Nolasco, Robert Knepper, Muse Watson, and Silas Weir Mitchell as inmates, and Wade Williams as the primary correctional officer villain. Famously, the show was largely shot on location in the former Joliet Prison and nearby Chicago, and it looks fabulous.
On the other hand, "Prison Break" is a soap opera. There are over-the-top dramatic twists left and right, and the scripts are written so that your average twelve year-old can follow along without difficulty. There are subplots devoted to Michael's lawyer Veronica (Robin Tunney) unraveling the conspiracy behind Lincoln being framed, and Lincoln's teenage son L.J. (Marshall Allman) being driven to a life of crime by the baddies trying to ensure his father is executed. There's nothing wrong with any of this, except the execution is so lacking. There are multiple instances of bad ethnic stereotypes and poorly used prison vernacular, and way too many cases where prison officials are willing to bend protocol so that Michael or Lincoln can get away with something just in the nick of time. The show is also shot and edited in the most overbearing, obnoxious way possible, with the Ramin Djawadi score blasting over every cut to commercial, like reality programming.
The characters are extremely shallow. Michael's a brilliant, insightful mastermind who has obsessively planned the escape, and yet keeps taking stupid risks and tends to choose the most elaborate and circuitous ways of doing things. He also falls in love with attractive prison doctor Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies), who conveniently also happens to be the governor's daughter. I feel for Dominic Purcell, because Lincoln is written as an absolute lunkhead, who shouts his feelings in any dramatic situation, and Purcell has little opportunity to inject any subtlety or complexity into his performance the way some of the other actors were able to. There's a scene where Lincoln literally berates the warden to let him go look for his missing son, despite being days away from his execution. The rest of the ensemble can be more fun, especially the actors who get to be more theatrically villainous, like Knepper and Williams.
Part of my disappointment with the show is that "Prison Break" has a great premise, and many of the people involved are very talented. However, the end result is so compromised and diluted by the demands of television at the time, and I found it pretty disposable. Even the parts that were good, dumb fun kept being undercut by elements that I found so contrived, it completely broke my suspension of disbelief. A big part of the problem is that I know enough about how the justice system actually works that the more idealized characters who do the right thing often struck me as far too naive and unbelievable. 2005 was before the prestige TV era and all those antihero protagonists really came in, so Michael is still expected to be unreasonably morally upright, despite being surrounded by convicts.
I'm glad that I watched the first season of "Prison Break" for context, if nothing else. As I've been working through my Top Ten TV project, it's been enlightening to trace the trends and expectations of episodic television back through the years. "Prison Break" is a show very much of its time - ambitious and novel in many ways, but also very beholden to the programming demands of broadcast television.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment