Wow. An almost pitch-perfect TV blockbuster. This jaw-dropping, seat-gripping, mind-bending jail drama-thriller would thoroughly glue you right into your seat, as you try to take the helluva ride that you wouldn't want to miss. Yep, even a miss-out episode would make you feel incomplete, or even incompetent to step into the maze that is Prison Break. This might remind you a bit like The Escape From Alcatraz, but there's no Clint Eastwood all over it. Instead, there's a guy named Wentworth Miller and man, did he rocked the role. As the name speaks for itself, the Season 1 just went and it was worth it.I love this show. I had never been glued in front of the TV for ages (well, except from Grey's Anatomy, which is entirely a different story because it's a hospital drama), and I had been trying to immerse myself in Lost but I just couldn't help to get lost out of it too. And then Prison Break came. What else, it was a breakthrough surprise.
I had been trying to bisect the anatomy of Prison Break, and tried to analyse why was it so watchable and utterly compelling that it forces audience to hurtle from episodes to episodes and just never break free from it. First off, it's appeal to its audience. What was amazing, in my opinion, to this show was its plot. Alright, it's TV and they made something that feels like a film that runs for like 22 hours. The plot is just marvelous, carefully thought and somewhat incredulously constructed. Michael Scofield is an intelligent man, a decent guy who lives his decent life out of trouble. He's a structural engineer who works in a large engineering firm. And once he discovered for his own self that his brother, Lincoln Burrows was in prison and was innocent of the crime he didn't commit, he was guilty of the things that he thought about his brother: the murderer of the Vice-President's brother. Lincoln was about to be hanged and within three weeks, Michael would be doing the most unlikely thing in the whole world - to save his innocent brother. Lincoln, while sitting in death row, didn't know that his brother Michael, was making an elaborate plan to get his brother out of Fox River Prison, and it just happens that Michael Scofield, the structural engineer, was one of the designers of the prison itself. He smuggled the building's blueprints and tattooed it all over his body. Season was focused on the escape, and Michael had deliberately robbed a bank to be incarcerated in the same prison his brother was in. Yet, everything was planned, and every careful step would be on its way, inmates would involved, people will be killed, and this series would wound itself to the perfect time they would make themselves out of the prison walls. And beneath the struggle for escape, to find justice and redemption, little by little, Burrow's attorney and ex-girlfriend Veronica Donovan was also in a dangerous journey in unearthing a web of conspiracy that was something greater, something like politics behind it all.
The characters were very engaging. Like most TV series, they were able to carefully bring out the life of each character, their own stories. Michael Scofield was a believable character and what was more awesome was that it felt like Wentworth Miller didn't act it. It came out naturally from it. I think that was something great from an actor; they make the characters they play convincing and Scofield did not come off as Wentworth Miller but Scofield himself. Undeniably, this would be Miller's breakthrough act and he's on his way to his career now. Inmates were present too, some were very annoying in fact, and some were pathetic and most of them were sympathetic. There's Sucre, the Mexican inmate of Scofield's cell, the hateful T-Bag with the devilish grin, the former mob boss Abruzzi, the pathetic boy-toy Tweener and the rest of the crew was manageably believable. There's also Dominic Purcell as the convicted brother Lincoln Burrows, and the TV-turn of Robin Tunney as Veronica Donovan. Yay, they're both brilliant.
The environment was played convincingly, and even though we know it's all fiction, the writers were able to pull off good dialogues and a situation that was almost realistic. It's also the writing that made the episodes very cliffhanger-like.
Watch this series, and please don't overreact if you find yourself physically craving for the Season 2. It's very suspenseful, has depth, and awesomely engaging to say the least. And that just the least of it, there's more to Prison Break than what meets the eye. It's an intelligent thriller, a very good drama filled with convincing yet little-known cast (except for the three leads; Miller, Purcell and Tunney), and an unexpected TV guilty pleasure. You just can't help but get addicted to it too. And oh, Brett Rattner directed the very first episode, which obviously launched its way to jail goodness. This would remain to be one of my very few TV-series favourites.
Rating: A
