I imagine that someday when I look back on my life, I will regret how much I talked up season one of Prison Break. My prophecy has to do with a growing acceptance that the show doesn’t meet the high standards set by television in the decade following the show’s initial run on Fox. Television upped its game over the past decade and left Prison Break behind, a fact made plainly evident by this clip. Honestly, that guard didn’t see Schofield because he was just – just – out of sight? He really believed that he was holding a toothpick in place while the glue dried for a fake Taj Mahal… and that Schofield said nothing when the door opened? And then kept quiet while the alarms wailed on and on? What? WHAT? And somehow despite all this, I’m wondering if the acting is worse than the writing. These considerations are laying the foundation for my future embarrassment.
However, the clip did bring an important idea to mind. The name of the episode is ‘English, Fitz, or Percy’ and as I recall the suspense throughout the hour nearly killed me. The question dictated the episode – what do those three names refer to? The tension finally broke when Schofield initiated the escape alarm and observed how the police will respond in the event of a jailbreak. He noted which road would give him the best odds for success and snuck back inside just in time to maintain his cover.
The big idea this episode reinforced for me is how finding ways to observe actual behavior often tells us so much more than learning about theoretical behavior in the form of plans, intentions, or predictions. I’m sure anyone can plot the fastest driving route from the police station to the prison. I bet a phone call to the sheriff’s office would lead to at least a rough outline of the emergency response plan. But what’s a surer way to know what will happen than finding a way to recreate the event and simply seeing what happens? One way I applied this idea in the past is how I checked job candidates for their attention to detail. I could have simply waited to ask in the interview “can you give me an example of how you demonstrate good attention to detail?” but that would only have invited a hypothetical response that may or may not have been true. Instead, I included limits in the job description on the length of cover letters and resumes, and then threw out any application that exceeded the limits.
Of course, the counterarguments are too numerous to list in full. The best summary of these is that context often determines the behavior. If there was a temporary road closure on the night of the fake escape, the information gained isn’t going to be of much use weeks later. Context counts, perhaps much more so than anyone will admit. I suppose this gives me a reason to hype up Prison Break’s credentials after all – in the context of a show whose name tells you the ending, I guess it’s remarkable that its most notable feature was suspense, and perhaps this fact excuses some of its blatant shortcomings.
