Haven't seen it, but after reading this I very much want to: (1st episode repeated on Ch5 tonight at 11pm)
Get into jail Charlie Brooker
Saturday January 21, 2006
The GuardianHooray! Hooray for Prison Break (Mon, 10pm, Five), because it's wholly bloody stupid and doesn't care who knows it! In fact, it's SO ridiculous, it might just single-handedly usher in an all-new golden age of inanity, thereby confounding anyone who thought society had reached its ultimate idiocy threshold a few years ago with the invention of novelty ringtones.
Prison Break is possibly the dumbest story ever told. It makes 24 look like cinéma vérité. It's as realistic as a cotton-wool tiger riding a tractor through a teardrop. I've played abstract Japanese platform games with more convincing storylines. And the American public recently voted it Favourite New TV Drama at the People's Choice Awards. Suddenly, the farcical tragedy of current world events makes perfect sense. I'm not saying the Americans are stupid. They're not. All I'm saying is a substantial number of them may well have lost their minds. Centuries from now, historians will cite Prison Break as the quintessential artefact of a civilisation sliding into absolute babbling madness. It's that good.
The set-up is as follows. Justin Timberlake has a problem - he's not called Justin Timberlake any more. He's called Wentworth Miller and he's a structural engineer. But that's not the problem. His brother's the problem. His brother's a Clive Owen lookalike with jawbones so square he looks like he's trying to hide a box in his mouth - and he's on death row for murdering the vice president. Except he didn't do it! He's the victim of a shadowy conspiracy! And only Justin Timberlake knows the truth!
Now, Justin loves his brother. Loves him with the kind of unquestioning intensity mere acting, dialogue and direction can't possibly hope to convey. So he cooks up a plan. Step one: he robs a bank - and gets caught on purpose!
Following the trial, Justin's lawyer (and close personal friend) can't work out why the previously intelligent, mild-mannered structural engineer would do such a thing. More perplexingly still, he seemed to actively welcome his prison sentence. "This just isn't like him," she muses. "He just rolled over - he didn't put up a fight." Two qualities that should prove handy in prison.
But he hasn't gone crazy. He's simply entering step two of his plan - because he's now in the same prison as his brother! And he's going to help him escape! It all sounds like the sort of scheme Elmer Fudd might dream up while drunk. It isn't. It's far stupider than that. You'd need a supercomputer to work out all the drawbacks.
But Justin has an ace up his sleeve - an ace that might, in our universe, be considered implausible: he designed the prison himself. Remember I said he was a structural engineer? For Whopping Contrivance, Inc? Well he is. So prior to committing his armed robbery, he had the prison blueprints tattooed all over his body! Brilliant!
Hilariously, Justin is so certain of success, he actually enters the prison with a smirk on his face. This immediately irritates a guard, who asks him whether he's religious man. No, says Justin. "Good," replies the guard, "Because the Ten Commandments don't mean a box of piss in here." The dialogue continues in this vein for the rest of the programme and, I hope, the entire series.
And so it begins - headlong we plunge, headlong into the very maw of folly. Gasp! as Justin has a fight with the tall scary bloke from Fargo. Coo! as Justin bonds with the absurdly cute female prison doctor! Cry! as the governor begs Justin to help him construct a matchstick model of the Taj Mahal for his 40th wedding anniversary!
I'm not making this up. All of this happens in the pilot episode. It's like they took a two-year-old to see The Shawshank Redemption, asked him to recount the plot three weeks later, wrote down everything he said, and filmed it. It's flabbergasting.
Got the stomach for it? Then tuck in. But tread lightly. Because Prison Break is so astronomically dumb it could genuinely damage your brain.