I’m going to send some props out to Mike for introducing me to my new fave show: Prison Break.
Before I forget, Benoit resurrected his blog. Check it out here.
Back to my props. Mike told me about Prison Break around Thanksgiving…since I was a little low on good shows to watch, I decided to download it.
Holy crap this series is great. I love television these days…all serialized format where it’s like you’re watching a mega-movie. (sidenote here about how Quentin Tarantino directed the season finale of CSI last year just to see how TV production is. Now he loves it and thinks he can do a lot more with story in a series than in a 2 hour flick. Awesome.)
Anyhow, the show revolves around one guy in jail on death row and his brother getting himself thrown into jail so he can break him out. Oh yes, and supposedly the brother on death row didn’t do it, so there’s that side story of lawyers/friends trying to prove he is innocent.
Why do I love this show? Excellent storytelling for one. I am engaged the whole way through. I thoroughly enjoy the cast and the character development. Working inside a prison, you can create a character you need out of thin air since there are thousands of people there. It’s not like they are on some mystical island in the land of nowhere…actually this brings me to Lost (my other fave show right now) and how they smartly said that there are more people who crashed on the island than they actually show. So if they ever need a new character (read: someone to blow up, like the ensigns on Star Trek) they just pull them from this random pot of survivors.
Anyhow, I haven’t finished watching the season yet…about half way through (I download them off the Internet since I don’t have TV cable) but I may try and have a marathon run this coming weekend to finish the season off.
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Should I start talking about how Alias is biting the royal big one lately and how I’m not depressed that the show is getting cancelled? For the past two seasons, I have found the show to start out slow and uninteresting…but then they ramp it up near the end to make it all worthwhile. I’m hoping they will do that for the series ending.
Should I start talking about how I love the fact that I can download TV shows and watch them whenever I want instead of being pulled from my every day doings to go sit and watch a TV show? I just wrote an essay on this subject which I should put up here which analyzes how broacasting companies like the CBC should offer up their shows on the Net as free downloads and keep an archive forever. I like the ‘on-demand’ society better than the ‘must be in front of the TV at 8:00. No worries I can set my VCR…NOOOO! I forgot to set my VCR!!!’
Granted, it takes awhile to download a show…overnight usually. But hey…if I’m not in a rush to see them anyhow, I’m saving some sweet cash from not paying for TV cable. Granted, this may change when Mike moves in with me in January. Heck, I don’t mind paying for TV cable. Scratch that…I do mind. We’ll see what we can do to get around that. In no way am I talking about illegal means that I was using at my previous home. 😉
4 replies on “Review: Prison Break (and other shows I watch)”
I haven’t watched Prison Break yet, but the commercials for it make it look great.
But there’s one thing I don’t understand, why do they have a Fall Finale for it?
One show we started watching this fall is Medium. It’s pretty good.
Also, two other GREAT shows: My Name is Earl and The Office. Both of these are frickin’ hilarious. And coincidentally, on tonight.
I believe that television is slowly going towards the greater way of storytelling. Aka, don’t bother sticking to normal means and timelines of distribution.
In a normal season of airing…shows run from Sept – April. But that only accounts for an average of 20 episodes over a span of 32 weeks. So really, there are 12 weeks that regular shows don’t show anything…whether it be during the holidays, or before sweeps week where they play reruns all the time.
Prison Break (much like the Sopranos) airs a slew of episodes back to back to back with no interruptions and then bam! It’s done. As for Prison Break, I haven’t seen the whole season up to now yet, but I think it returns in March. I don’t mind waiting three months for them to play back-to-back episodes.
I should check out Medium…and I’ve heard good things about Earl and The Office. Must start downloading these!
You will definitely like The Office. Steve Carrell and all the other actors in this show are so funny.
That last comment was from Me