‘Prison Break’ Is an Underrated Crime Thriller Beloved by Stephen King

Stephen King once made a distinction between what he thinks is great television and what he actually can’t stop watching. His answer to the latter wasn’t The Wire, The Sopranos, or even Breaking Bad, which he called the finest series on television. It was Prison Break. That’s either a fun piece of trivia or a genuine reason to reconsider a show that’s been filed away under “early 2000s pulp” for too long. Let’s go with both.

Prison Break premiered on Fox in 2005 with a premise that had no reason to work as well as it did. Structural engineer Michael Scofield ends up in prison on purpose, the entire escape plan tattooed across his body, to break out his brother Lincoln Burrows before a wrongful death sentence is carried out. The first season averaged 9.2 million viewers and turned the show into an early poster child for binge-watching before that was even a real term. It was appointment TV at a time when that still meant something.

‘Prison Break’ Peaked Early and Still Got Away With It

Fox

The honest version of the Prison Break story is that it peaked in Season 1. Season 2, a sprawling chase across the country with the escapees constantly one step ahead of the law, is arguably the best part, and King even said that himself. Seasons 3 and 4 pushed the premise further than really made sense, and Fox eventually canceled the show in 2009. It had a good run, but it was time.

King wrote about his love for the show in Entertainment Weekly, and he wasn’t shy about just how much he loved it. He said:

“I love Prison Break madly, deeply, truly… If you picked up the first three seasons on DVD and watched them all at once, your frakkin’ head would explode.”

Then came the revival. In 2017, eight years after the original ending, Prison Break came back for Season 5 on Fox. The reception was mixed. It had its moments, but it couldn’t quite recapture what made the first two seasons work. Plans for Season 6 followed anyway. Although writers worked on scripts and figured out a new direction, by 2020, Wenworth Miller stepped away from the role publicly and said he no longer wanted to play straight characters. Dominic Purcell backed him immediately, and creator Paul Scheuring eventually walked away from development, too, after clashes with the network. That’s why Prison Break Season 6 never happened.

Why ‘Prison Break’ Seasons 1 and 2 Are Worth Your Time

Dominic Purcell as Lincoln Burrows and Wentworth Miller as Michael Scofield in Prison Break

What gets lost in all of this drama is how good Prison Break actually is at its core. Miller’s performance as Michael Scofield, a desperate man who is always three steps ahead, is one of the more underrated lead performances of the decade. The ensemble around him holds up, too. Robert Knepper’s T-Bag is the kind of villain who you genuinely can’t look away from, and William Fichtner as FBI agent Alex Mahone is just flat-out great. King called Fichtner, “probably the best character actor on TV,” and it’s hard to argue with that.

There’s also more going on underneath the surface than Prison Break usually gets credit for. Michael and Lincoln aren’t really outsmarting anyone. They’re running, but they’re running in circles, and they keep ending up exactly where they started. That’s not a plot failure, it’s a plot device. King described it as a “crazy existential subtext,” and it’s what gives the show more weight and meaning than its reputation suggests. For a series that looks, on the surface, like pure adrenaline, it has a lot more going on than you would imagine.

If you’ve never seen Prison Break, the first two seasons are a genuinely good watch. If you wrote it off years ago, it’s worth a second viewing.