(UDHAYAM, HOLLYWOOD) – Prison Break Season 5 finally has a release date: Tuesday, April 4 at 9 p.m. on Fox.
It’s still unclear when the show will release in the U.K. Come April, it will be nearly 12 years since Prison Break first aired in August 2005.
Fox TV chairman and CEO Gary Newman spoke with Variety ’s Remote Controlled podcast earlier this week to discuss the decision to bring the series back. One of the reasons Newman finds Prison Break so interesting is the way the constrained plot evolved over the years.
“We love Prison Break. It was a fantastic experience when we produced that series. It was in some ways, you know one of the challenges of the concept.
It really didn’t lend itself to a multi-year series. It could have easily been a one-season show, they escape and get captured and that’s the end of it.”
Obviously that didn’t happen. Prison Break went on for four seasons, moving from the U.S. to Panama and breaking out of new prisons.
“We were having such success with it and it caught on with the fans in such a big way that our creators found a way to tell the story over multiple seasons.”
After Prison Break ended in 2009, episodes eventually made their way to Netflix where the series saw a huge spike in viewership. It performed extremely well internationally, especially in the U.K., and it was one of the most popular shows streaming.
After seeing this, Newman said they reached out to creator Paul Scheuring for a reboot, but he always turned the offers down.
“There was really not an obvious route to a new series,” Newman explained. “Then we got this fantastic phone call from his agent a year ago saying Paul had an idea and he wants to come back and talk to you about rebooting Prison Break. It was a great story.
His vision for it was to bring back all the characters.”
And here we are, over a decade later. Wentworth Miller, once 33 filming crazy stunts, now 44 years old. “I think the audience is going to be really thrilled both the old fans who will want to see it and the new fans who are going to discover it for the first time,” Newman concluded.
In a new promo, viewers see the moment when Sara (Sarah Wayne Callies) learns the truth about the fate of her other half, while also offering a glimpse at Lincoln’s elaborate plan to break his brother out of prison AGAIN alongside Sucre.
The first clip, which aired in August last year, showed behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the cast and executive producer Dawn Olmstead.
Olmstead said: “All the people you loved from the original Prison Break play a significant role in helping Michael [escape],” while Dominic Purcell (Lincoln) added that the revival “is going to be better than the original”. (Courtesy – Daily Mail)
