Prison Break

Fox announces its Autumn line-up

18 May 2006 Rob Buckley Post a comment

In the wake of NBC and ABC, here comes the line-up for Fox’s Autumn schedule. Not many surprises here, particularly the demise of Stacked.

Returning

24

American Dad

American Idol

America’s Most Wanted: America Strikes Back

Bones

Cops

Family Guy

House

King Of The Hill

MADtv

Nanny 911

Prison Break

The Loop

The O.C.

The Simpsons

The War At Home

Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy

Axed/Ended

Arrested Development

Free Ride

Head Cases

Killer Instinct

Kitchen Confidential

Malcolm in the Middle

Reunion

Stacked

That ’70s Show

The Bernie Mac Show

TV reviews

The US season finales are upon us: Smallville, Supernatural, Prison Break, The West Wing

17 May 2006 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

A good finale to a TV series can keep you watching even the biggest rubbish imaginable. They can be exciting, tense and a whole load of other things.

Stress, of course, is a major health hazard. Therefore, so that UK viewers can brace themselves to an appropriate degree, I’ll be giving near-spoiler free guides to just how tense and exciting each of the major US TV shows’ finales were, starting today. US TV shows don’t end all at once: they’re spread over a period of three weeks or so, so there’ll be another couple of updates to come after this over the next week or so.

Chlark

Smallville

Pretty tense, but not quite as tense as previous seasons’. Some good moments, some irritating moments and one excellent moment. Yes, Chloe and Clark finally get to smooch. Ha, Lana! I’m expecting a typical Smallville memory-wipe next season, though, so the tension will be only temporary at best.

Tension factor: 7/10

Supernatural

Supernatural

The finale was a couple of weeks ago and was actually quite good. Bleak, nasty and with almost no hope for the “sexy supernatural ghosthunters”. Since it’s part of an ongoing plot, I’ve no idea how quickly things will revert to X-Files “monster of the week” or whether there’ll be a format change coming with the move of the show to The CW.

Tension factor: 8/10

They made the break

Prison Break

It’ll be no surprise for anyone to hear that the motley band of inmates manages to escape in the last episode. Or that it all goes a bit pear-shaped. But there are a good collection of other surprises and the ending is actually my one solitary recurring nightmare. Obviously, with them out of prison, there’s going to be a complete change of format in season two, so it’ll be worth tuning in to see what season two will be like “After the Prison Break”.

Tension factor: 9/10

The West Wing's finale

The West Wing

Since the show’s been cancelled, no tension at all here. The finale was written by John Wells, who’s been responsible for most of the worst episodes of the show of late. It had a couple of okay moments and a few resolutions of ongoing plot lines, but not many. A flat ending to a former favourite.

Disappointment factor: 8/10

In the coming guides: CSI, CSI: Miami, CSI: New York, House, Numb3rs, 24, Scrubs, Lost, The Unit (assuming it has a finale soon – they’re showing two episodes every Tuesday now)

Incidentally, in compiling this guide, I watched CSI: New York for the first time in ages because the episode on last week looked like it should have been the finale. But it wasn’t. Anyway, the show’s still dull, it turns out, but I’ll bite the bullet, take one for the team, and watch this week’s episode, too.

Buckley’s Crime Show Hypothesis needs a new name

4 May 2006 Rob Buckley 2 Comments

On Saturday, I suggested that the producers of US crime shows don’t watch any of the other shows. I’ve now decided to expand the hypothesis to include other genres, thus necessity a name change for the hypothesis, which will now be called “Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ hypothesis” (so-called because only people in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!”).

I’m prompted to do this hypothesis-expansion because of Monday’s episode of Prison Break. During the last five minutes of the show, there was an extended montage overlaid with an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “So what?” you ask yourselves. Well, the thing is Prison Break airs on the Fox network in the US, as does House MD, everyone’s favourite tale of grumpy doctors. And as I’ve droned on about ad nauseum, the theme tune to House in the US isn’t the same as it is in the UK (the UK’s theme is apparently called “Buddha Grass Soul(kpm 548)” and was composed for the show especially, because of licensing issues). The US theme to House is in fact Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Two Fox shows in more or less the same time slot, both using the same piece of music.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned this to avoid being too anal about it. But Variety picked up on it, too. When quizzed though, Fox replied, “The music supervisor for Prison Break didn’t know it was the theme song for House.” But as Variety’s Josef Adalian points out, surely one of the producers of Prison Break will have watched House at some point.

Except if my hypothesis is right, of course… Still, I feel I need more evidence before I can bump my hypothesis up to the status of theory. And ‘Law’ is going to be a long time coming, I suspect.

Prison Break resumes its plummet into absurdity

25 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Ah. I am so gratified. Prison Break sounds like a stupid idea, right from the get-go: man commits crime so he can get sent to the exact same prison as his brother, the same prison he designed and whose plans he has tattooed on his body. How dumb is that? Nevertheless, over the past season it’s done it’s lovely best to fix the obvious flaws in its set-up.

But this week’s episode proved magnificent in terms of returning us back to its initial level of implausibility again. Because this week, the evil “Company” everyone kept talking about that we all thought was the CIA, turned out to be something even better. It’s a secret group of multinationals that secretly and in secret run the entire world! They appoint politicians, judges, everyone!

Magnificent. Now all it has to do is beat CSI: Miami to take the title of silliest but most engrossing show on US television. That’ll take some doing though.

UPDATE: I’m watching last night’s episode of CSI: Miami right now and “Ryan Wolfe” just asked a woman out on a date. He invited her to a Mexican wrestling match! Prison Break has nothing on this!

Prison Break getting more and more impressive. And Lost, get your skates on

12 April 2006 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Okay, Prison Break is still immensely stupid at heart, but I’ve actually been surprised by how well the show is progressing in the US. Last week, we had the flashback episode that showed most of the inmates on the outside and how they all wound up in jail. This week we had the “it’s all falling apart” episode. What I liked about it was the economy of writing. In a show like Prison Break that has a weekly cliffhanger and an ongoing plot, there’s a tendency on the part of the viewer to assume that any obstacle that gets thrown up is purely for the sake of the cliffhanger.

This week’s episode threw back two events that had almost been forgotten from last year. I won’t spoil it for UK viewers by saying what they were, but by episode end, you’ll be thinking to yourself “Ooh, that’s clever” and you’ll have new respect for Michael and his planning skills. And, incidentally, for the other inmates, who aren’t so bad at planning either, it turns out.

Plus it had Michelle Forbes in it. Anything with Michelle Forbes in it has to be good by definition.

By the way, for those of you not watching Prison Break and wondering if there’s going to be six more seasons of people trying to break out of jail and constantly being foiled, it’s already been revealed that season two is going to consist of the escapees on the run after their first season break out – although not everyone manages to escape. So it’s not going to be Lost – The Prison Days.

On that subject, could the writers get a move on with Lost please? It’s starting to irritate? Still, I was expecting that. After all, it comes from the writers of Alias, the show that was all tease, no real plot development and no real payoff. From what I hear, Alias‘s final episode isn’t even going to mention Rambaldi. No Rambaldi pay-off after five years? Bastardos! On that track record, I’m confidently predicting they’re all still going to be stuck on that island with no explanations at the end of the seventh season.