Alcatraz
Season One (Status: Canceled)
It’s that time of year. Television shows are wrapping up their seasons, and networks are deciding what to keep and what to chop in order to prepare for the next season. I’ll go ahead and tell you: Alcatraz has already been cancelled. It was announced earlier this week.
Funny thing about watching this show: my husband and I were watching it live every Monday night instead of DVR-ing it, not because it was OMG-MUST-SEE-TELEVISION, but because we had nothing else to watch on Monday and Alcatraz had an interesting premise, a somewhat likeable cast, and it was enjoyable in the same way that eating food when you’re bored can be enjoyable.
We made it through seven episodes. And then the funny thing I mentioned earlier happened:
Alcatraz was pre-empted one night by Fox in order to air the Daytona 500 (the race should’ve been the day before, on Sunday, but due to rain delays and the wreck from hell, they postponed it to Monday, and thanks again to rain delays, it was pushed to Monday night). That wasn’t a biggie. What was a biggie was the following week, the next episode was two hours. At first, I thought they were lumping the missed episode with what should’ve been that week’s episode in order to stay on schedule. But no. Being the geek I am when it comes to television shows, I looked up the episode guide on tv.com (note: the order has since been changed) and realized that the episode in question, “The Ames Brothers/Sony Burnett” was always supposed to be a two-hour event, and that the episode we missed due to Daytona, “Clarence Montgomery,” was the episode I remembered seeing the preview for (before the race screwed things up), but it would air the week AFTER the two hour event.
If you follow this blog, you know I’m a sucker for order. And I hate, hate, hate reading and watching things out of order. So my husband and I decided to hold off on the double episode, watch the “Clarence Montgomery” when it came out, then go back and catch up, and we’d be on schedule.
But we never did that. The routine had been broken, and we found other things to do. So the episodes just piled up until the finale, and then we decided just to catch up when the rest of the television season had wrapped up (which is now). And then I decided, quietly, to wait and see if the show would get renewed, because there was no point in watching if the show didn’t get renewed. It didn’t. So the rest of the episodes were deleted from the DVR.
I’m not sorry. Like I said, Alcatraz wasn’t must-watch television. If it had been, we would’ve been caught up. The trouble with the show dealt with the predictability of the show’s format (escapee comes back, returns to criminal ways, Rebecca Masden and her team catch them, and if they’re alive by episode’s end, they’re taken to a secret, carbon-copy facility of Alcatraz and put back in their “original” cells). The heroine, Rebecca Masden, was also difficult to warm up to, like the writers were trying too hard to show just how tough she was, and they went overboard.
The interesting thing about this, and I mentioned it to Greg at the time, was that when my beloved Fringe premiered, the first half of the first season suffered from similar problems. A predictable format to the episodes, with the female lead being a little difficult to warm up to, as she was all business, all the time. But Fringe blossomed in the second half of the first season as the writers figured out what they were doing, leaving me with a first season finale that was so awesome it made Fringe must-watch television for me.
You may be wondering: if I only made it through half of Alcatraz‘s season, how do I know it didn’t do the same? The answer is because I kept an eye on the general pulse of the show, noting reactions to it on various websites without getting into spoilers. Nobody was very excited about this show, about how it was wrapping up. And the response to the first season finale was lukewarm, basically saying “It had a great car chase.” That sure is a ringing endorsement!
So that’s key. Also, another interesting point of comparison: Fringe‘s first season was 20 episodes. Alcatraz only had 13. So the mid-point happened sooner for the latter than the former, if that makes sense, as the show had less time to turn it around, as it started in January and ran on mostly uninterrupted. Fringe premiered in the fall and took the typical winter break, giving the writers a chance to regroup and review.
Alcatraz wasn’t a complete waste of time. I loved Jorge Garcia’s Dr. Diego Soto (yay, Hurley!), and Sam Neill’s Emerson Hauser was starting to get humanized and likeable before we stopped watching. And I was definitely engaged by the flashbacks between 1962 (?) and the present day, which revealed not only what the prisoners were up to then and now, but showed that there was more going on behind the scenes with the prison guards and warden than one would have originally thought. It wasn’t just the prisoners coming back either: guards had returned, as well as a few others, and the why’s and how’s of it all was a nice question to chew on.
But I will say, despite the trouble mentioned above, it was a little frustrating to keep getting fictional prisoners wrecking havoc. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that using real names and likenesses would’ve likely gotten some people sued, but the fictional quality of that part in a setting that’s so real and permanent, kind of added to the sense of disbelief. How much more exciting would it have been if Al Capone had come back? Or one of the men who had escaped from the raft (which would mean, in the show, it was all a conspiracy)? Some of these criminals didn’t feel like they should’ve been sent to Alcatraz to begin with, but what do I know? I’m not an expert, and I’ve never visited the prison. That being said, the stakes never felt to be very high. The show had some interesting subplots, but overall, I was never hugely concerned for the characters or their fates.
Oh well. It was enjoyable while it lasted.
Blue Magic (2012)
