‘Prison Break’ Already Came Back and Nobody Cared

The Big Picture

• Prison Break was a groundbreaking show with well-rounded characters and intense tension, but it gradually lost its way with contrived plot twists and resurrections of dead characters.
• The show’s canon became increasingly confusing and ridiculous, resembling a parody of itself as it introduced an Illuminati-like mega-corporation and magical supervillains.
• The attempted reboot in 2017 failed to capture the magic of the original seasons, with more convoluted storylines and even tying in real-world geopolitical tensions.

Prison Break was awesome, wasn’t it? Well, at least half of it was. The Fox prime-time show ran for a bonkers and twist-packed four seasons and a 2017 reboot, and is now permanently engraved into the minds of those who watched it in its prime. In the age when Netflix was still a door-to-door DVD rental service and the Internet was mostly limited to forums and cat videos, there just wasn’t anything quite like Prison Break on TV. It was packed to the brim with interesting, well-rounded, well-written, and incredibly well-acted characters full of life and charisma, and the tension the show masterfully built was almost asphyxiating at times, pushing those characters to the brink of death and even killing fan favorites with a regularity that predated Game of Thrones.

There was a time when people the world over were tuning in live from the edge of their seats to see what sticky situation the Scofield brothers and their team of friends and frenemies would be getting themselves into or breaking themselves out of next. So, what went wrong? And more importantly — why, after more than outstaying its welcome and already trying and failing to reboot itself… is Prison Break coming back yet again?!

The recently announced reboot is happening, and the show’s protagonist, Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), won’t be returning to his iconic role. Even so, this reboot is still supposedly going to continue in the same world as the expansive (and confusing) established canon, instead of being a typical hard reboot. It could be quite a risk to dive back into the muddy waters of Prison Break lore and try to carry on, as the canon is almost as bonkers as the Saw series at this point. Not to mention, the last reboot wasn’t exactly a hit either.

What Is ‘Prison Break’ About?

Prison Break tells the tale of the Scofield brothers, Michael and Lincoln, facing off against a global, Illuminati-like mega-corporation that conspires to rule the world from the shadows. The company, creatively called “The Company,” frames Lincoln for the murder of a government official, placing him on death row for a crime he did not commit. Enter Michael, handsome boy-genius and industrial engineer, to save his brother’s life. Michael gets himself arrested and thrown into the same prison as Lincoln, covering himself in a full body tattoo that hides the blueprints of their barbed-wired stomping grounds with the intention of breaking out together before Lincoln is executed. Very quickly, Michael has to turn to the help (or hindrance) of fellow inmates to successfully pull off his great escape, and so comes together the show’s iconic cast of criminals, with fan-favorites like the suave, smooth-talking Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) or the evil yet charismatic T-Bag (Robert Knepper), to set their differences aside and mutually help each other Shawshank the hell outta there.

With that, the stage was set for one of the most epic, action-packed, and thrilling first two seasons on network TV. That wouldn’t last though, as the show started to collapse under its own weight at the halfway point of its (originally) four-season run. Season 1 was entirely set inside the (first) prison that the Scofields and Co. found themselves in, centering almost entirely on the prison break itself and the riveting plan that slowly comes together over a masterfully paced 22 episodes. There’s some of the Illuminati B-side plot going on outside the jail, as Lincoln’s ex-girlfriend and hotshot lawyer Veronica tries to get to the bottom of the conspiracy that landed her ex-lover on death row, but it’s more of a tasteful dressing to add some depth and mystery to the otherwise straightforward great escape plotline. Season 1 shines through its awesome characters, its intense season finale (one of the best in TV history), and powerhouse performances across the board from actors such as Robert Knepper and Peter Stormare.

Season 2 is still tight, tense, and hectic as all hell, as it follows our cast of characters on the other side of the fence, running from the law as they try to escape the country after successfully breaking out of prison. At the same time, they try to pull off a heist that promises to land 5 million in cash, while on top of that, still dealing with the murderous shadow operations of The Company as they attempt to assassinate the Scofields and their people. It was great! Things started to get a little far-fetched here and there with twists and betrayals that would require a truck-load of coincidence to actually happen, like Michael’s lover’s father turning out to be a Company Operative, but it was still tight and tense enough to be great TV. Perhaps the strongest point of Season 2 was its two iconic villains, Kellerman (Paul Adelstein) and Agent Mahone (William Fichtner). These were horrifyingly trigger-happy villains whose murder sprees built up a huge body count of fan-favorite characters, and yet, they still somehow managed to be interesting and charismatic characters that fans wanted more of.

Why Did ‘Prison Break’ Gradually Get Worse?

In a period when shows typically outstayed their welcome and became increasingly hard to follow (and hard for writers to pay off), Prison Break too fell into the early 2000s trap of jumping the shark. By Season 5, a frankly ridiculous number of character deaths were retconned, bringing back the dead in unbelievably ridiculous ways (including fake-out beheadings with fake heads), while the plot got more and more bogged down by its addiction to throwing twists and betrayals into almost every episode. Reaching the heights of the most surreal of soap operas and telenovelas, Prison Break was ultimately put to rest after a whopping 79 episodes and a TV movie, outdoing the runtime of most prime-time shows by at least a dozen hours while still somehow ending up so contrived and confusing, you’d think it was rushed.

You see, even though Season 3 had plenty of great moments, it was here where the shark was swimming. Season 2 had silly coincidences and hard-to-swallow “I am your father!” style twists, sure, but from Season 3 onward? The show began to feel like a parody of itself. The Illuminati stuff became ridiculous, as the company grew so powerful that they came across less like a corrupt mega-corporation and more like a magical force of global supervillains, so comically evil that their own agents, who were just gleefully murdering innocents for their employer moments before, started having random moments of morality and switching to the good side (then going straight back again when the show doesn’t meet its weekly twist quota).

The show kept trying to keep up its trend of killing off characters while not willing to commit to their deaths, bringing back the dead more times than one could count. Now consider that this already happens twice in Season 1, with one character surviving a slit throat and another a (staged) bullet to the brain, so just imagine how ridiculous the deaths eventually get, considering that fake-out deaths were already part of the Prison Break formula. Because of this, all the tension that defined Prison Break and made it such a hit show wore off as audiences realized that the death of their favorite character, no matter how explicitly on-screen, can (and likely will) be reversed.

Last but not least, the show just couldn’t find a way of justifying the characters coming together to work on prison breaks, heists, and getaways. Of course, you can’t have Prison Break without its ensemble cast of heroes and villains and a season-spanning criminal master plan of some kind, so the chain of events that leads to these characters crossing paths gets unbelievably contrived. By Season 3, the show somehow had to justify that the central group of prison breakers, who have all already broken out of jail, had done a multi-million dollar heist together while on the run from the law and the Illuminati. Not only that, but they’ve ended up in jail together once more alongside not one, not two, but three of the previous season’s villains. The prison was now in Panama, and the show tried desperately to force the stakes to go higher and higher, like an unstable tower, until the whole thing just collapsed under its own weight by the end.

‘Prison Break’ Already Tried a Reboot and Failed

After four seasons and a TV movie finale, Prison Break had somehow managed to include three prison breaks, two multi-million dollar heists, an inoperable brain tumor moment, and an ungodly amount of double crosses, fake-out deaths, and canon-shattering revelations. The show was finally laid to rest after giving us iconic highs and facepalming lows, ending with the somewhat contrived (some would say forced for dramatic effect) noble sacrifice of our protagonist, Michael Scofield. We’re treated to the epilogue of all the remaining characters, with some getting a happily ever after, those not deserving of one not so much, and Michael’s family, having finally found peace after essentially defeating the Illuminati, eating a picnic beside Micheal’s grave. We had fun, Prison Break, but we’re done now… right?

Wrong! Because nobody can stay dead in this universe, Mr. Scofield is actually alive! Another Illuminati had faked his death and kidnapped him to send him across the world to be a prison breaker by trade, helping VIP escape imprisonment for… reasons. In this 2017 reboot attempt, Scofield has been presumed dead and prison breaking all over the place in secrecy for a decade, and is now in a Yemen prison to break out another VIP. Scofield sends messages to America to get as many of his old crew back together (or as a cynic would say, all the actors who were willing and available to return for the reboot) to help him enact the show’s fourth prison break.

Overall, the season was more of what the show’s final limps and stumbles back in 2007 had led us to expect: Scofield’s Prison Breaking partner is T-Bag’s long-lost son (yes, T-Bag, the show’s most detestable villain, gets a weird father-son redemption arc), Sarah’s almost-10-year-lasting marriage turns out to be to the leader of the second Illuminati group that’s keeping Michael captive, and plenty more twists and turns. Things were still somehow finding ways of getting sillier, and to boot, the reboot tried to tie in some real-world geopolitical tensions by including ISIL (or… ISIS) as a group of beheading-happy villains in what felt like a tone-deaf attempt to harp on the success of Homeland.

All in all, Prison Break more than ran its course, only to be brought back and driven even deeper into the depths of incomprehensible messiness and shark-jumping insanity by its reboot. So, to hear that we’re coming back to this world yet again, where two Illuminati have already collapsed, doesn’t spark confidence, honestly. But we’ll have to wait and see!

Prison Break can be streamed on Hulu in the U.S.

Watch on Hulu