In the US: Mondays, 9pm ET/PT, Fox
In the UK: Acquired by Watch
A year ago, JJ Abrams had two shows on the air: Lost and Fringe. Lost, of course, was a story about a mysterious island that could cause people to travel through time; Fringe, which is still running on Fox, sees a group of federal agents (and a civilian weirdo), investigating strange crimes and criminals operating at the fringes of science.
If you were going to predict JJ Abram’s next show, only in wildest cynical pastiche would you have come up with Alcatraz, a show about a mysterious island that causes people to travel in time while a group of federal agents investigate strange crimes and criminals.
Yet here it is on Fox. It’s even got Hurley (Jorge Garcia) from Lost as one of the leads, as well as that nice Sam Neill from Jurassic Park. The basic plot: the Alcatraz prison wasn’t actually shut down because of lack of money, but because every single person in the prison, warden and prisoner alike, disappeared one night back in the 60s. Now, one by one, they’re popping up again, not having aged a day, and the government wants to find out why and stop them from committing any more crimes now they’re free.
And to nobody’s surprise, it’s not even half as good as Lost or Fringe. Here’s a trailer.
