Hulu confirmed on 10 September that its “Prison Break” reboot is shooting, and it now has a name: “Prison Break: Black Creek.” The headline everywhere is the title and the teaser. The more interesting fact is the one nobody put in a headline. The man running this show is Elgin James, who co-created and ran “Mayans M.C.,” and who went to prison himself in 2011, the same year his first film premiered at Sundance. Hulu has given a series about incarceration to a writer who has been incarcerated.
Two short videos went up, not one, and neither is really a teaser in the sense the word usually implies. One runs 21 seconds, the other 17, and between them they contain about four images. There is no release date. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for both “Black Creek” teasers, the detail on the woman’s hand, and how the reboot’s premise inverts the original series.
Hulu has given a series about incarceration to a writer who has been incarcerated.”
Here is what is actually in them, because it is worth being precise about how little this is. The longer clip opens on a clapperboard being lifted away from a prison cell, and holds on the cell after it goes: a bunk, a metal cart, a pair of shoes on the floor, nobody in the room. Then the words “now in production,” then the Hulu logo and the title. The shorter one opens on a clapperboard too, then cuts to a woman shot entirely from behind, her hand pressed flat against a bright frosted window, beating on it. “In production.” Then “coming soon.” That is the whole marketing campaign so far.
The one deliberate detail is on that hand. There are letters tattooed across her fingers, one to each, the classic knuckle placement, and the shot lingers long enough that you are clearly meant to notice them. We pulled the clip and went through it frame by frame, and we will be straight with you: at the resolution Hulu published, the letters are legible as letters and not as a word. ScreenRant reads them as spelling “Love Less.” We could not confirm that from the footage and are not going to pretend otherwise. What is beyond doubt is that the first thing this show has chosen to show anybody is writing on a body that you cannot quite read.
Which is, of course, the whole franchise in one image. “Prison Break” ran on Fox from 29 August 2005 and built itself around Michael Scofield having an escape plan tattooed over his entire torso, a blueprint disguised as art that the audience spent a season decoding. Putting four unreadable letters on a hand in the first ten seconds of your reboot is not subtle, and it is not meant to be. It is a promise that this show knows what it is a sequel to.
Which raises the question worth asking about any reboot wearing a franchise name: what actually connects them? The honest answer is that no returning character and no returning actor has been announced, and on the evidence of three separate casting waves, every single name attached to this show is new. What is genuinely carried over is behind the camera, and it is more than a courtesy credit. Paul Scheuring, who created the original series, is an executive producer here. So are Dawn Olmstead, Marty Adelstein and Neal Moritz, who executive produced the original. Four people from the show that made this franchise are producing the show that is rebooting it, with 20th Television making it and James’s Sierra Drive banner alongside. The link is not a character walking through a door. It is the people who built the first one signing off on the second.
The premise is where it gets genuinely interesting, because it takes the original’s central move and flips which side of the bars it happens on. Cassidy Collins (Emily Browning) is a former soldier who takes a job as a corrections officer at Black Creek Penitentiary, one of the worst prisons in the country, in order to get somebody she loves out of it. Michael Scofield got himself locked in. Cassidy gets herself hired in. Same trick, opposite door, and a guard’s access to a building is a very different set of tools from an inmate’s. Read the official logline closely and it is doing something else too. The wording is that she takes the job to prove how far she will go for someone she loves, which is a sentence about her rather than about a plan. The original sold you a blueprint. This one is selling you a limit, and limits are the kind of thing a series finds out by crossing.
The ensemble around her splits the show into three worlds rather than one. Drake Rodger plays Tommy, an inmate ten years into a sentence at the same prison. Lukas Gage plays Jackson, who is not in the building at all: he is a politician from a well-to-do family, running his first congressional campaign. Clayton Cardenas is Michael, who goes by Ghost, with JR Bourne as Junior, Georgie Flores as Andrea, and Myles Bullock as Darius, who goes by Red. A guard, a prisoner and a candidate is a wider net than the original ever cast. Cardenas is worth flagging: he was a regular on “Mayans M.C.,” which is to say Elgin James brought one of his own with him. And yes, there is a character called Michael in a “Prison Break” show who is not that Michael, which is either a nice piece of misdirection or a headache waiting for the recap writers.
The recurring cast is where the shape of the thing shows up, and it says this is not only a prison show. Across two announcements Hulu has added thirteen names, and the ones with characters attached point somewhere specific: Sam Trammell plays Jarrod Boggs, described as a powerful figure with deep roots in West Virginia, and Noah Emmerich plays Callum Faulls, Jackson’s father and a respected West Virginia power broker. Chris Coy is Mule, an inmate the material calls dangerous and unpredictable. Sean Bridgers, Kerry Bishe, Robin Weigert, Jean Louisa Kelly, Catfish Jean, Augie Duke, Brad Beyer, Greg Vrotsos, Daniel David Stewart and Michael Mosley fill out the rest. Two separate West Virginia power brokers, one of them a regular’s father, is a lot of world outside the walls for a show named after a building. That is the “Mayans” instinct showing: an institution is only interesting if the town around it is.
Back to James, because the hire is the story. He founded FSU, an anti-racist crew that fought white supremacists in the American punk scene, and his past caught up with him at exactly the wrong moment: he was sentenced in 2011, the year “Little Birds,” his debut feature, played Sundance. He has been open that he writes from that directly, telling one interviewer that on “Mayans” it was “a hundred percent of myself in everything” and that it all started autobiographically. He took over as sole showrunner of that series after Kurt Sutter was fired and ran it to its end. On “Black Creek” he is showrunner, executive producer and the director of the pilot, which is about as much authorship as a network hands anybody. Whatever this turns out to be, the person shaping it has stood inside the building.
What is not coming back is as clear as what is. This is a new cast in the same world, and Michael and Lincoln are not expected. Wentworth Miller settled that in November 2020, posting “I’m out. Of PB. Officially” and explaining the reason plainly: “I just don’t want to play straight characters. Their stories have been told (and told). So. No more Michael.” That is not a door anybody should be trying to reopen, and the reboot has sensibly not tried. The original ran four seasons, closed with the 2009 film “The Final Break,” and then came back anyway for a fifth in 2017. This is the third time this franchise has been resurrected. The first two times it came back to Michael Scofield. This one is going somewhere else, with a showrunner who has a reason to care whether the prison feels real.
What Do You Think? Does making the protagonist a guard rather than an inmate open the format up, or does it lose the thing that made the original work, which was watching a man solve a building from the inside? Is naming a character Michael in a “Prison Break” reboot a knowing wink or a mistake? And with no release date and four images to go on, is Hulu confident or stalling?
See you on the next binge!
