It is natural enough to have mixed feelings whenever a beloved TV show is revived. Reanimating the dead is fraught with complications. Perhaps the old magic isn’t there, there was a good reason it finished or maybe we’ve already moved on.
If you have a problem with the return of Prison Break on Fox tonight, however, then maybe it’s you that needs locking up.
Some great TV shows are of their time, better fondly remembered than resurrected. But what show better expresses our paranoid conspiracy-fixated times than Prison Break? It’s the most timely show you could possibly revive.
Throughout its four-season run, a shadowy cabal of transnational corporations calling itself The Company powered a conspiracy as bats*** as anything Alex Jones could dream up.
With the FBI currently investigating the potential ties between members of President Trump’s campaign and Russia, it feels like exactly the right time for the return of a show starring Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell.
In recent years, TV networks have thrown everything into finding the new Lost. How we marveled as multiple clinkers like FlashForward, Alcatraz, Rubicon, Awake, The Event and Heroes have swirled around that conceptual toilet bowl only to be flushed after a season or two.
To varying degrees, all of them attempted to conjure that weird alchemy of mystery and metaphysics that shot Lost into the TV Hall of Fame. None of them succeeded.
These efforts would have been much better spent trying to recreate the potent mix of MacGyver and Shawshank that made Prison Break such a success. The eye-popping tale of genius structural engineer Michael Scofield breaking his wrongly convicted brother Lincoln out of maximum security facility Fox River, Prison Break kept audiences captivated and guessing for four seasons between 2005 and 2009.
Never has a show been more comfortable within its genre. Prison Break raided the prison flick armory for stock characters and tropes and had an absolute blast with them. Sadistic wardens, white supremacists, sexual predators, whackjobs and Mafiosi formed an ensemble cast ever ready to throw down and crack skulls when the situation demanded it (and sometimes when it didn’t).
That first season, chronicling the escape from Fox River, remains the show’s purest—an homage to every against-the-odds jailbreak you’ve ever seen.
People overlook how funny Prison Break is. Its eye for the absurd was as sharp as any comedy broadcasting at the time. The long-running saga of murdering Nazi necrophile paedophile Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell’s hand is a good example. T-Bag and his left hand first parted company when Mafia boss John Abruzzi chopped it off in the season one finale (he had it coming). T-Bag exited the season stumbling through woods, his severed hand tucked into his armpit.
Season two began with T-Bag forcing a veterinary surgeon to reattach his left hand without anaesthetic. Despite having a roster that usually comprised castrating dogs, the good doctor did a stunning job which T-Bag thanked him for by killing him immediately afterwards. As with all great comedy, the key was in the timing.
The running gag of T-Bag’s hand kept them rolling in the aisles throughout the notoriously tricky sophomore season. Several weeks after its emotional reunion with his forearm, separation trauma struck again. T-Bag found himself chained to a radiator and was forced to rip his hapless hand back off to free himself. T-Bag’s hand felt like an uncredited character in its own right. The show’s fans made GIFs of its adventures.
Not one to let being a one-handed bandit slow him down, T-Bag would later forge an unlikely career in sales. Stealing the identity of a Tony Robbins style salesman at the GATE corporation, he made an instant impact by making meaningless inspirational speeches about “the captivity of negativity”. He may not have made any sales but damn, it was hilarious watching him try. It was almost as if all you needed to make it in the corporate world was to be a criminal sociopath with a ready collection of fatuous buzz phrases.
The ever-brilliant Robert Knepper played this role to perfection. It was quite some time before someone at GATE said “hey, isn’t that the escaped Nazi necrophile who’s been all over the news?” and his sales career was tragically curtailed.
The laughs didn’t stop there though. Multiple fake deaths also brought the house down including Scofield’s love interest Dr. Sara Tancredi surviving apparent decapitation (long story). A dark chuckle was raised too by the incest between President Caroline Reynolds and her brother (short story but let’s not go there).
Then there was FBI agent John Self’s stirring speech to Company operative Gretchen after she double-crossed him. “You’re a whore,” he informed her “Your mother was a whore and her mother was a whore. And your father used to turn tricks at a gas station ‘cause he was a whore too.”
This, deep into its fourth season, was Prison Break’s Gettysburg address. Among its loyal band of followers, there was barely a dry eye.
So let us raise a glass with our remaining hands to the return of Prison Break—the show that made all-powerful conspiracies devoted to the corruption of democracy funny again. May we never escape its clutches.