Fox Has "Prison Break" Spinoff in The Works
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It's actually kind of shocking with the serious downturn in quality that Prison Break has suffered in the past two years, to find that Fox is paying for a pilot script that will be spun off the current season sometime next year. I was among those that thought the concept of this show was a terrible one, mainly because it was unsustainable. I then made the mistake of tying its potential for quality to its seemingly inevitable downfall due to stagnation.After it debuted and I was hooked on it like crack, I threw away all my early misconceptions and declared Prison Break to be the next smash hit that would bring in tens of millions of viewers for five or six solid years to come. It really was that good.
But when I threw my quality concerns to the wind and reveled in the amazing heightened drama, I gave it the benefit of doubt and just wrote off the "sustainability" problems, those which have now come to the front. The second season was simply terrible, and the third isn't looking all that much better, and yet they want to do a spin off of an unsustainable show with another unsustainable show, changing only the sex of the main character:
Tentatively titled "Prison Break: Cherry Hill," the potential new series would be set at a women's prison and center on Molly, a new regular character who will be introduced on "Prison" later this season.
Fox has ordered a script of the possible spinoff, which is being written by "Prison" executive producer Matt Olmstead and co-executive producer Zack Estrin.
A search is under way for an actress to play Molly. "Prison" producers will determine in which episode she will make her first appearance after casting the role. If "Cherry Hill" doesn't go forward, Molly will continue on "Prison" as a regular character.
Molly is an upper-middle-class wife. After suffering a family tragedy at the hands of the Company -- the government conspiracy that framed Michael (Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) and put them behind bars -- she seeks them out at the hellish Panamanian prison Sona in her quest to exact vengeance.
The thing about Sona is that it was hellish and scary and very foreboding the very first time we saw it at the end of season two, and wasn't all that welcoming at the beginning of season three - but now we're acquainted with the prison, its players, and all the inter-connected relationships between them, and everything is much less scary now that it was before. I was actually apprehensive during those first few episodes, not knowing who or what is lurking around any given corner.
Now I just don't care.
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