No Surrender Cinema: Prison Break
Welcome to the first No Surrender Cinema of 2025! While covering the Roddy Piper/Billy Blanks team-up Back In Action for the Bulletproof Podcast, myself and the rest of the Bulletproof staff briefly mentioned some of the action classics celebrating an anniversary this year. While 1985 in particular was full of notable entries into the action genre, this particular column is only traveling back two decades to talk about a television series that left a lasting impression on me. Since I recently revisited the series thanks to it becoming available on Netflix, and 2025 is its 20th Anniversary, there’s no time like the present to talk about Prison Break!
I can remember back to the summer of 2005, seeing ads for Prison Break‘s upcoming debut (I can recall one promo using Papa Roach’s then-new song “Take Me”), and the premise immediately had my attention. A man, seemingly imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, was facing Death Row, only to have an ally purposely get himself incarcerated in order to break the wrongly convicted man out. At the time, I can’t lie and say that I was fully invested in network television’s various thrillers like Lost and 24, but I was captivated by the ads for this new show, which was going to be airing on Monday nights smack dab in the middle of Monday Night RAW. Damn it!
As fate would have it, I put that minor inconvenience aside (hooray for having multiple VCR’s!), and would soon find myself immersed in the world of Prison Break. Though the initial idea of Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller), a brilliant engineer who was the younger brother of Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell), a man accused of murdering the Vice President of the United States’ brother, getting locked up solely to help his brother break out was enough to draw me, Prison Break went one step further right from the jump. When Lincoln protests Michael’s scheme, thinking it’s just foolish hope on behalf of his younger brother, Michael not only reveals that he helped build the prison, but he went so far as to get a full body tattoo with all of the information they would need for their escape. Obviously, any guy with blueprints of a prison infirmary inked between his shoulder blades might tend to stand out, so Michael made sure the work was done a bit more incognito, disguising the various maps, addresses, and other pertinent information as some type of object or code to ensure it was blended in and didn’t set off any alarms (pun intended).
The problem with the prison break itself (not the show), would be the variables; the various characters that the brothers would encounter. Michael’s cell mate Sucre, homesick and lovesick, longing for his girlfriend, would agree to help Michael as long as he could go with him on the escape. Michael’s need for certain things put him in the crosshairs of mob boss John Abruzzi, and the two would have a rather tense understanding. Then there’s old man Westmoreland, a convict who legend had it was actually the infamous DB Cooper. C-Note was the head of a prison gang with a knack for getting his hands on whatever you needed…for a price. Then there was T-Bag, a notorious con best known for two of the most vile things a human being could be; a racist and a rapist. As far as the supporting cast who weren’t behind bars with the brothers, it includes Lincoln’s former lover, lawyer Veronica Donovan, who is working to get him exonerated and can’t understand what Michael is doing. Prison nurse Sara Tancredi, who would play a bigger role in the events of Prison Break than any of our main characters could have imagined; Warden Pope, a kind but firm man who takes a liking to Michael; Brad Bellick, the lead CO who is abusive towards inmates, especially Michael; and Secret Service agent Paul Kellerman, who has been tasked with ensuring that Burrows is executed so that certain secrets that could have ramifications in our nation’s capital never see the light of day.
Season 1, what I’d call and what most regard as the best season of the show, had so many twists and turns that there were times when I was watching back then wondering how they could possibly follow up. Then, of course, there was the question of when the characters would break out, and what would happen then? Would the show just end with them running off into the sunset, living in a foreign land under assumed names for the rest of their lives? It’s safe to say, seeing that when you go to Netflix and see that there are multiple seasons AND A MOVIE (more on that in a bit), that there’s a lot more to the story than just what was promised by the title.
Season 2, which picks up immediately after the escape by Scofield, Burrows, and several others, had just as much tension and drama due to the storyline shift. Now we weren’t wondering about when/how our heroes would get out of prison; now we had to watch and see how they’d survive while they were on the run. Season 2 also marked the first appearance of William Fichtner as Federal Agent Alexander Mahone, who was put in charge of bringing the prisoners back to Fox River Penitentiary, and who would become one of the most integral parts of the show for the remainder of its run.
After two seasons, some might wonder how much more juice could be squeezed out of the concept, and the idea was to put some (but not all) of the remaining main cast back in prison! While that might have been eye-rolling to some people (and I do know of several people who considered Season 3 to be the downfall of the show), they did try to freshen things up by having it be a Mexican prison that was full of its own problems, not to mention dangerous prisoners. Naturally, it was again Michael Scofield who would come up with different ways to “work the system” and craft a plan to get out, only this time he didn’t have his brother with him 24/7 watching his back.
Though some stopped at Season 3, Season 4 is easily the most controversial of the four original Prison Break seasons. In fact, it was extremely similar to the final season of The A-Team, where our four heroes were captured after all those years on the run from the military and would find themselves working for Gen. Hunt Stockwell. In Prison Break, those that remained alive and on the right side of the law would be brought together and promised with pardons by agent Don Self (Michael Rapaport) if they could get their hands on a MacGuffin that would help to bring down The Company, aka the shadowy organization of the powerful elite that had been pulling the strings since way back in the first year. I can tell you from firsthand experience that this season is not looked upon fondly by a lot of people, including one of my best friends, who lists it as the #1 reason as to why he now has a raging hatred for Michael Rapaport.
Season 4, and the series as a whole, does end with closure for our main characters, but it also ended with two unaired episodes that were released on DVD as a way to fill the gap in between certain events. Prison Break: The Final Break sees the character of Sara Tancredi put back in prison not as a doctor, but as a convict. Having fallen in love with Sara over the course of the show, Michael rallies the troops once more in order to perform yet another break to rescue Sara, one that would have the most resounding consequences of anything else on the show.
I always enjoyed Prison Break and was sad to see it go, even though I could admit that it had run its course long before it came to a conclusion. I remained a fan over the years and would rewatch my DVD sets every so often, so you can imagine the surprise and excitement I felt when FOX announced that Prison Break would be returning for a special mini-series back in 2017! This was especially surprising given what we saw go down in those final few episodes, but it was nothing yet another storyline twist couldn’t fix. I was happy to see Prison Break back on the air, but the 5th season event series felt more like a spy/espionage thriller than anything. Had the storyline been done for something like 24, The Blacklist, Alias, or any of those known for their international incidents I could understand it better, but for what Prison Break was it felt too complicated (not that a guy using his tattoos as a road map for an escape route wasn’t complicated either).
Now, some of you may read those last few paragraphs and wonder if Prison Break is worth the watch, and I will tell you in the strongest manner possible that if you haven’t ever seen the show, you need to do it now! Yes, there are some cons (and not just the guys in prison…ZING!), but to me they are outweighed by the performances and writing, especially in those first two seasons. Wentworth Miller is awesome as the smart, stoic Scofield, and Robert Knepper (who was the star of one of my childhood favorite action flicks, Wild Thing) really elevated his profile as the slithery, scenery-chewing scumbag T-Bag. There’s also a bit of humor thrown in for good measure, usually at the expense of Sucre, who it seems can never win, however the show sticks to the thrills more than it sticks to going for any laughs.
I had thought about writing about Prison Break a few months ago during my rewatch, and when the mention of action anniversaries came up on the podcast, this was one of the first things that sprang into my mind. Then a decision was going to have to be made if I should wait until the actual anniversary to write about it, but who knows if it’ll still be streaming on Netflix by then. So for those of you who are reading this and have never seen it, or maybe you’ve seen a little of it and need to go back to it, let this column serve as a reminder that you can watch it in full right now on Netflix, and if streaming apps have taught us anything over the past decade, it’s that you should watch it sooner rather than later!
Prison Break quickly became one of the most-talked about shows of the mid-2000’s, and quickly earned a spot as one of my favorite shows. It also runs in the family, as my younger cousin became hooked on it after seeing it at my apartment back in the day, and liked it so much he even wrote a paper on it for school! That was about 15 years ago, but hey, now that makes two of us in our family that have written about Prison Break! What was once a heavily advertised, talked about show seems to have faded from view slightly over the years, so here’s to hoping that Netflix is putting eyes on it again. Whether you check it out because of this column, or you’re a lapsed fan looking to catch up on it, Prison Break is just a click away, and hitting that button on your remote will be worth it.
