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This year the fall television season is set to kick off a bit early with the début tonight of Prison Break, one of the more lauded new shows of the fall TV season. Globe and Mail television columnist John Doyle writes …
Prison Break (Fox, Global, starts Monday) is about a guy who goes to prison to get his brother out. He’s got the blueprint of the prison’s design tattooed on his body. That’s the gist. Fast-paced, kinetic, moody and filled with characters either brutal or beatific, it grabs you by the throat and takes you on a wild ride. Michael (Wentworth Miller) is the hero. His brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), is on death row and scheduled to die in a few months. As Michael sees it, Lincoln has been framed for the murder of the brother of the vice-president of the United States. There’s been a cover-up and, in some way, the Catholic Church is involved. The prison setting is dangerous and filled with foreboding. The warden (played by Stacy Keach, who did time in prison in England in the 1980s) is well-meaning but wary of Michael and Lincoln. Heavily promoted by Fox, the series gets a jump-start by launching this week. With little else new to watch, it could get viewers instantly hooked.
John Crook, reporting for zap2it.com, provides some background on Prison Break. USA Today’s Bill Keveney also weighs in on tonight’s début of Prison Break, as does USA Today critic Robert Bianco, who says “check it out”.
Meanwhile, The Vancouver Sun’s Alex Strachan says, “a breakneck-paced thriller about a prison break will make the weeks fly by before a new season of 24 débuts in January … Prison Break is a fast-paced, rousingly good entertainment — a rock ’n roll roller-coaster ride that hurtles along the tracks like a runaway train.” Strachan awards Prison Break an A- rating.
The fact that first-rate actors Peter Stormare (Minority Report, Chocolat) and Robyn Tunney (The Craft, The Secret Lives of Dentists) have opted to set aside their movie careers in order to star in Prison Break speaks volumes about its probable quality. The series débuts tonight at 8 p.m. on your local Global TV outlet (BCTV locally), with a 2-hour season première.
Update: Following a week of fun and frolic, VanRamblings finally got around to watching the 2-hour season première of Prison Break. Our assessment, overall: comme çi, comme ça. Although the actors’ performances are across-the-board solid and praiseworthy, the writing is at best pedestrian, the production values (camera work, cinematography) second rate, and the story line cheesy and requiring of such a level of suspension of disbelief as to pull you out of the narrative. The good thing? We won’t be adding Prison Break to our regular television viewing this upcoming fall TV season, allowing us time instead this autumn to pine away for lost love, now found.
