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Fox Network is notorious for killing promising shows without giving them a fair shake. Alcatraz, produced by J.J. Abrams, came in as a mid-season replacement in January 2012 and lasted for a whopping 13 episodes before retiring for the summer. The exciting cliffhanger it left its fans with smarts a bit as Fox, in all their Arrested Development wisdom, did not see fit to pick it up for a full run this year. Of course, that didn’t stop Warner Bros from releasing Alcatraz: The Complete Series on blu-ray last week for its fans to celebrate its brief run with (and make whatever final profit from the show they can).
This series was founded on an incredibly mysterious premise that dealt with the sudden reappearance of 302 Alcatraz inmates in the present day. They were last seen in the year 1963 and have not aged at all since their disappearance. A team of three agents, San Francisco Detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones), herself connected to “the ’63?s” through her grandfather (Robert Forster), a psychiatrist and Alcatraz expert, Dr. “Doc” Soto (Jorge Garcia), and the mysterious former Alcatraz guard, agent Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), are assembled to hunt down the returning inmates, known as the ’63?s, while more secrets about the island and the phenomenon are revealed.
The mysterious drama of Alcatraz is peppered with a nice chemistry between Jones and Garcia as they decide whether or not they can trust the suddenly violent and always unpredictable expert that guides them along their way. The series quickly expands on the one-prisoner-a-week format and included tidbits of background information on some of the darker characters inside the prison (in flashbacks to 1963) that opened the story up for a darkly entertaining look at the famous prison and its isolated location. There is a total “What If?” vibe the stories tease viewers with. And, as a viewer of its original broadcast, I remember thinking that it was a nice change…while it lasted.
Maybe the reason the show was cancelled has more to do with Lost fatigue than anything else. Maybe viewers were tired of mysteries. Maybe they didn’t want to get involved in another flashback-oriented show that mixed timelines frequently in an effort to present an ambitious mystery. Either way, it’s a sad fact that Alcatraz received its all too sudden death penalty without a pardon.
MPAA Rating: TV14. This title has not been rated by the MPAA.
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