Monday, January 30, 2006
The ballad of Fox River Gaol
INSIDE! Prison Break, Five, 10.00pm
As is so often the case with us, we rather dropped the ball last week and forgot to draw your attention to the series opener of this much-hyped new US drama, but we're attempting to make amends by doing a bit of a song and dance about it this week. After the bumper season that was 2004-2005 giving us international superhits such as Desperate Housewives and Lost, there was a lot of pressure on new series to deliver the goods - and many of them fell by the wayside, not just in the ratings, but in terms of sales to overseas networks. After all, while everyone wants to land the next Lost, no one wants to get so trigger-happy that they end up with the next Point Pleasant (and the fact that the latter, despite its embarrassing awfulness, is now available on DVD while the infinitely superior Veronica Mars seems unlikely to get a terrestrial debut, much less a DVD release, is very much to our chagrin and something that we will probably get on our soapbox about on a fairly regular basis, so steel yourselves for that as best you can).
Despite having been on a slightly-longer-than-usual hiatus in America (we think - there hasn't been a new episode since November, and the website states that none are due until March), Prison Break was one of the success stories, being hailed as a successor to 24. The plot, for the uninitiated, is that Lincoln Burrows has been imprisoned for a murder that his brother, Michael Scofield, is adamant Lincoln didn't commit, and it's only a matter of time before Lincoln is executed by the state. With a disappointing lack of evidence making life remarkably difficult, Michael comes up with the only obvious solution to their conundrum. See, he just so happens to be a structural engineer who has the blueprints for the prison, so he hides the blueprints in tattoos all over his body and gets himself locked up behind the very same gates. Erm, obviously.
Preposterous setting, certainly, but then no less credible than Jack Bauer going an entire 24-hour period without noticeably taking a toilet break. Plus, of course, it's a prison drama which means lots of gratuitous male flesh (the fact that the tattoos will surely need repeated examinations is going to help with this) and a dash of homoeroticism (come on, it is prison after all) make this a fairly decent bet. And if that isn't enough to tempt you, former Neighbours starlet and unequivocal lover of all things English Holly Valance will be making a guest appearance in episodes ten and eleven. Hurrah!
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1 Comments:
I can't look at that bloke without thinking of him as a bitchy cheerleader in Popular.
I miss Popular.
By 
creepylesbo, at
11:37 am
