Prison Break Reboot Officially Ordered At Hulu

Prison Break, which debuted on Fox about twenty years ago, was an interesting phenomenon. It’s the kind of premise made for the limited episode counts and high budgets of streaming: Michael Scofield has come to bust his brother out of a high-security prison;  can he pull it off? Yet it premiered in the days of linear network dominance and long, nine-month seasons with lots of padding and filler. Somehow Prison Break managed to keep tension up through that long first season and deliver a satisfying ending.

But then, of course, the show had to keep going. Season Two was about trying to keep OUT of prison. Okay, fair, that’s a natural progression of it. But then there was a Season Three and oh no, Scofield is now in a DIFFERENT prison! That’s where I turned the show off and never came back. To this day I haven’t seen all the other seasons or extensions that were wringed out of the thing. I got what I wanted; that first season delivered. Why would I want any more?

Hulu is betting that someone will want more. It was reported months ago they were looking into a reboot of Prison Break, and as of now they have committed to it. The good news is, they are not dragging out the Scofield story any further, because they can’t — Wentworth Miller has said he will no longer play straight characters. The entire cast will be new, although I’m told it is within the same universe.

Emily Browning (“American Gods”) will play the main character, an ex-soldier who becomes a corrections officer “at one of the deadliest prisons in America to prove just how far she’ll go for someone she loves.” Interesting that the main POV will not be from someone who needs to break out of prison. Other cast members will include Drake Rodger (“The Winchesters”), Lukas Gage (“The White Lotus”), Clayton Cardenas (“The Cleaning Lady”), JR Bourne (“Teen Wolf”), Georgie Flores (“Famous in Love”) and Myles Bullock (“BMF”).

Elgin James of Mayans M.C. is the showrunner, head writer, and executive producer, and he will share that latter title alongside series creator Paul Scheuring and original executive producers Dawn Olmstead, Marty Adelstein and Neal Moritz. We should be hearing more about this new prison in a few months.