Prison Break was the hot new show in primetime when it debuted in 2005. The 22-episode first season aired during the 2005/2006 TV season. It starred Wentworth Miller, Dominic Purcell, Sarah Wayne Callies, Robert Knepper, Amaury Nolasco, Wade Williams, Rockmond Dunbar, and Peter Stormare. Robin Tunney, Muse Watson, and Stacy Keach. The show's premise is that a man named Lincon Burrows (played by Dominic Purcell) is on death row in IL. He is set to be executed within a month for the murder of the Vice President of the United States. He maintains his innocence and insists that he was framed. When he exhausts all his legal options, his brother, Michael (played by Wentworth Miller), a structural engineer at the engineering firm that worked on renovating the prison his brother is in, hatches an elaborate plan to break Lincon out. This involves Michael getting imprisoned, which is basically the opening to the pilot episode. The plan plays out throughout the season and involves many supporting characters to a greater or lesser degree as the season goes on. The show is a serialized drama, where each episode builds on the next. It involves multiple threads and storylines that all end up intertwining. Obviously, the plan to break out does not always go smoothly, and It is often a two-step forward, one-step back scenario, which definitely helps with the tension and drama of the show.
The show is very well written and acted. Miller and Purcell are definitely the leads, but there is a very large ensemble cast, and the show does a great job balancing character storylines and screen time so that there are episodes in which Miller and Purcell take a back seat. The supporting cast in season one includes Sarah Wayne Callies as the prison doctor who is (unknowingly) integral to the plan to break out and Stacey Keach as the prison warden. The show does a great job of giving all the characters, inmates, guards, and the like, gray areas so that they are not all good and not all bad, and the entire cast does a great job portraying that.
The Blu-Ray set is a six-disc set. The A/V quality of the set is outstanding, and it contains a lot of extras. Those include commentary tracks on select episodes (sometimes more than one commentary track for an episode), deleted scenes, and about an hour's worth of behind-the-scenes and making-of material that includes cast interviews and showrunners, how they came up with Michael's tattoos, and a featurette on the history of Joliet prison where the show is filmed. So, if you like watching the bonus material, you get a lot here. Overall, the show is a good serial drama with great acting and writing. The showrunners had the entire plot planned out, and you get the idea that, even when twists are thrown in, it is not just ad-hoc and done purely for shock value. Given that it is set in a prison, there is a lot of violence as well as themes of racism, sex, abuse, etc., but it does not come off as gratuitous. It is definitely a good, binge-worthy show and worth checking out.
