Prison Break (spoilers)

Priosn Break, hey? What is it? Where did it come from? How on earth can a show which makes 24 look realistic be sooo enjoyable? But it really is brilliant. The twists and turns don't so much keep your interest as grab it right out of your eye sockets and glue it to the screen. If only anyone involved had a clue about such trivialities as "charecter development", "acting" or "continuity", we might have a genuine classic on our hands....

But, I jump ahead of myself. For those that haven't seen it, Prison Break is much like the title would suggest - the story of some men who decide to break out of prison. But it isn't all so simple as that. Michael, the pretty-boy main charecter (played by a man who makes women cream their pants simply by walking past them, Wentworth Miller - nice name, Wentworth...), is a succesful structural engineer who has never done a wrong thing in his entire life. Until, that is, the day he walks into a bank, demands money and promptly surrenders to the police. It soon transpires that Michaels brother is on death-row for a crime he did not commit (what other sort of crime can you be on death row for on TV?). Michael works out a deal to end up in the same prison as his brother.

Now here comes the juicy part - the series' main gimick is that Michael has had the blue-prints of the prison tattooed onto his body and then cunningly disguised them as a piece of art. With these, he has nearly everything he needs to get out of the prison. Unfortunately for the show, this is it's first major down-fall as it is blindingly obvious that the blue-prints ARE NOT THERE. The show tries hard to convince you otherwise, by using CGI to paint them on. This provides the impression that they are there, but it is transparently clear to anyone other than easily impressed 15 year old boys (and easily turned on 15 year old girls) that there are no blue-prints. This idea must have looked fantastically good on paper and also looks fantastically clever to thick people. The rest of us just feel patronised. However, this is hardly the first time a high budget US TV show has asked us to suspend disbelief in the name of a good story, so onward we move.

Michael gets underway with recruiting the people he needs to make his plan work. And a more thorough lack of imagination has ever been shown by TV producers and writers. We have Mob Boss, Token Black Guy, Token Latino Cellmate, a fantastically OTT "Wigga" and an old man who may (or may not) have stashed millions of dollars in the Utah desert. Oh, and the campest red-neck paedophile your TV could ever hope to throw at you, T-Bag Bagwell (played by one Robert Knepper). Performances are bad all-round, but Kneppers charecter really does stand out for extra scrutiny. Being the one individual who seems to have had some work put into charecterisation, Knepper clearly has fun with his role. Unfortunately, the rest of us don't. T-bag minces around the set like Austin Powers gone "gay 'n' KKK", yet at the same time attempts to carry an air of menace that is frankly laughable. This guy would last about five minutes in a real prison before he'd get shanked. His accent is the best thing; a slight lisp, a high-pitched Southern US drawl, the way he occasionally makes his voice sound all husky (usually when threatening a young boy with a solid bumming), if he'd as turned up as Vern Schillinger in Oz, we'd all just have laughed long and loud before switching to something more realistic. Like the teletubbies.

Actually, comparisons with Oz are unfair - this is a piece of pop-corn fantasy and Oz is heavyweight drama. But, comparisons are also inevitable and I'm not fair, so here we go. One lazily looks for easy answers as to how to break out of prison, the other never settles on any easy answers as to how a prison drama can break the mould. Both rely on archetypal goons, but whereas Oz attempts to turn these archetypes on its head, this takes them and runs with the vibe. One takes a look at the issues surrounding US penal system, the other takes the issues surrounding the penal system and turns them into a conspiracy theory....

Ah yes, the conspiracy theory element. I shan't go too deeply into it (mainly because I'm only halfway through season 2 and don't know everything yet) but it involves everyone from the vice president of the USA to the secret service to Michaels dad. I love conspiracy theory shows. I hate conspiracy theories, but I love stories about them. The fact that you get to the end of season 1 and the conspiracy is only half tied up leads one to believe that the writers and producers don't really know where they are going with this element of the story line. Not neccesarily a bad thing (look at Lost), but certainly indicative of Lazy Television.

Anyway, so I've told you the bad, but I also mentioned that this is incredibly watchable TV. So, what makes it so? Well, it's all about the twists and turns. One thing the writers have done incredibly well on is to end each episode on the most dramatic cliff-hanger possible. You simply have to find out how Michael is going to get out of this latest scrape. Actually, that's only half true. There is a big part of you that is silently hoping that "miss goody two shoes" Michael will somehow have slipped up this time, that he will be caught and thrown in a cell with "Big Phil the Man Rapist", a fait which awaits one of the shows only half likeable charecters, towards the end of season one. Why they chickened out and couldn't have shown Michaels already fairly constipated face after a heavy night of having his "sh*t pushed in" is a matter of constant speculation for me. But anyway, he always "gets away with it" in the end, no matter how tight the scrape and no matter what "it" is. Usually the way he gets round suddenly presented obstacles is highly dissappointing and lazily scripted, but as they often say "it's not always the getting there that matters, sometimes the journey is what counts".

In short, if you are a fan of high-end US drama, get this in your DVD collection. It is to Oz what 24 is to The Wire, but is that such a bad thing?