Prison Break

Welcome to the blogpost on Prison Break, or Why Some Shows Should Only Have One Series Really.  It’s been a light week from a TV viewing perspective.  New home ownership has seen my evening and weekend hours spent away from my favourite screen (and I haven’t bought a telly yet), whether that be spiralling in Old Kent Road B&Q because I don’t know what drill to buy, or spiralling at home because I’ve drilled fixings into the wrong bit of wall and totally destroyed the home I’ve saved for ten years to buy, or spiralling with happiness now that I’ve finally got a blind up over the bedroom window, sparing my new neighbours (and any innocent passer-by) the daily torment of my genitalia appearing in their line of vision while I’m putting my pyjamas on.  And yes, the whole blog so far has been about me putting a blind up.  Buying a flat has made me the most boring person in the world and I know this because my friends have not been shy in confirming it to me.

But this means we are indeed trawling the archives of old stuff I watched when my life still had hope.  Why prisons?  Well, thanks for that question.  It’s nice when we’re interactive, isn’t it?  I’ve been partly inspired by the return for a seventh and final series of Orange Is The New Black.  One of the good things about my flat (cue more boring chat – let’s call it flat chat) is that I have a bath again, but I get bored in there quickly, as lying inert in scalding water waiting for Epsom salts to assuage the cramps of my Crossfit-overtrained limbs and unravel the angry knots in my back isn’t as entertaining as I would like.  I’ve therefore been taking my laptop into the bathroom with me, positioning it away from the water on an old duvet box and enjoying me a bit of on-demand premium content while my glasses steam up and my fingertips go all pruney.  This is how I got through the mind-boggling second series of Dark (even more wildly ambitious that the first outing – watch it now).  I then thought I could catch up on the latest The Handmaid’s Tale in there (this is over a number of bathing occasions – I haven’t just been in the tub for weeks in one go) but Channel 4 only have the catch-up rights to that for twenty-five minutes or so after broadcast.  So off I went to trusty old Netflix to catch up with the ladies of Litchfield.  I’d forgotten who most of them were, but I soon remembered that I loved them.

Prisons, then…  A friend first showed me Prison Break during my final year of university.  We’re no longer in touch, but that is not a result of his boxset recommendations.  When people ask where I studied, I like to retort with a bit of modesty and say Hogwarts.  I’m not actually a wizard, but people’s viewing experience of the Harry Potter films is the best way to bring to life the realities of my tertiary education.  I loved learning so much that I got myself into ye olde Oxford University, where diversity meant someone didn’t go to Eton (I didn’t) and a Scout was a local woman who smoked in your bedroom whilst wearing a tabard and changing an empty bin.  I’m only naming the place for context: my college days were spent working hard.  Not as hard as I should have, but the workload was inordinate.  The approaching final exams, then, which accounted for 100% of my degree, rendering the whole four-year faff (with year abroad) an excessive preamble, only served to ramp up the fervent book-learning.

But each night we allowed ourselves an hour of leisure before bed, and that’s where the Prison Break DVDs got whipped out.  My friend wanted me to watch the whole of season one to demonstrate its mastery of the art of suspense.  He was righter than ever.  Each instalment ended on such an earth-shattering cliff-hanger, that we were succumbing to the concept of Just One More Episode long before I realised my life would end up with me writing an unpopular blog.  If you haven’t watched it, you’ve probably guessed that the storyline revolves around people breaking out of prison.  Pow, there’s your narrative tension straightaway.  Our hero is Michael Scofield.  He is so determined to break out his unjustly incarcerated brother (though he deserved his sentence for crimes against the male plunging neckline, by having a plunging neckline) that he has elaborate escape plans tattooed over his entire body and then commits a bank robbery to place himself within the prison walls.  Wentworth Miller’s growling, earnest whispers characterise his every line, while Dominic Purcell as the wrongly accused Lincoln Burrows barely grunts in return.  At each stage of progressing their plan some sort of compromise would be contrived that forced them to link in one more escapee.  Some we rooted for, like dear old Sucre, overreacting to everything, while the sinister sexual predation of T-Bag made skin crawl, though it did prompt discussions about who would be whose prison bitch.  Apparently, you just need to turn one of your pockets inside out and whoever held onto the protruding material was yours to do bitch things with.

Their chances of success were stretched out over a phenomenal first series, with twists, turns and panic-inducing disasters.  I’ve got to be careful to give away any spoilers, but if your whole first series is about breaking out of prison, where do you go from there?  Subsequent series, which I won’t dwell on here, became echoes of this first burst in descending order of volume.  Some characters would be on the run, others would be wrongly imprisoned elsewhere, someone else would be trying to break into another prison.  Then the womenfolk were getting imprisoned as well.  And throughout, LJ (Lincoln Burrows’ awful son) was gurning at the camera and chewing the scenery in response to the implausibility of it all.  To expand on some sort of justification for the whole thing, naughty corporation The Company was suddenly invented, along with some very devoted employees (I hated Gretchen), and I began to question my viewing choices.

In conclusion, some series really should only have had one series.  It’s called the Lost effect.  A good idea works really well as a single arc, but then gets stretched out to capitalise on audience demands till it snaps.  It’s like when someone brings salted caramel M&Ms to the office and you really enjoy having just one, but then suddenly everything is a blur and you’ve eaten 75 of them.  Prison Break even came back for a fifth series in 2017, but our only focus must remain the masterpiece that is the premier season.  That is its legacy.  And also, tattooing things on your body in case you’re worried you might forget about them later.