Kevin Barrett 
Let’s not bury the lead here: Prison Break will be back for a sixth season.
The serial drama that television viewers enjoyed on the FOX network for four seasons from 2005 to 2009—and also had a fifth season in the spring of 2017—apparently hasn’t aired its final episode. FOX is developing a new storyline for the hit show, and it will air for another season—at least! The confirmation is official.
FOX Entertainment’s chief, Michael Thorn, offered few details about what the sixth season will offer viewers, but is apparently very enthusiastic about the new season, which was made known to the public at the winter press tour of this year’s Television Critics Association.
According to Thorn, the new season will also be a “new iteration”; what that means, precisely, is unclear. He claims the new season won’t really be anything like what the many fans of the show are probably expecting.
At this time, it is unknown whether or not Wentworth Miller, who portrayed a main character named Michael Scofield over the course of the show’s five seasons, will be involved with the project. However, another star of the show—Dominic Purcell—did allude to the fact that the show would be returning via a post on his Instagram account last month.
Miller did tell the magazine “Entertainment Weekly” that he wouldn’t rule out the possibility of returning to the Prison Break Universe. He actually posted his ideas for a season six on a social media account. FOX executives, for whatever reason, turned his very interesting proposal down.
Apparently FOX hasn’t seen any scripts for the new season, and the “revival” is in very early stages. A pilot hasn’t even been written—at least not as far as we know.
However, it has been made clear that it won’t feature a completely new set of characters; therefore, while the new season’s storyline may end up being a radical departure from storylines of previous seasons, there will be plenty of familiar faces on our television screens.
Paul Scheuring, the show’s creator, was involved in the series’ fifth season, but at one point expressed reluctance when it came to making sixth season. He was concerned that the new season wouldn’t be as good as the first five. He has gotten over his reluctance, though, and had an idea that he felt worthy of pitching to FOX’s team.
Screenshot from the 1st season.
For those unfamiliar with the series, Prison Break’s first season largely revolved around a man trying to help his brother escape from prison. The prisoner, Lincoln Burrows, had been sentenced to death as a result of being wrongly accused of murdering a relative of the Vice-President of the United States. His brother, Michael, was desperate to free his brother before it is too late.
It wouldn’t seem like a show with such a plot could continue for years, but it did. The second season focused on what happened after the escape. Eventually, the brothers made it to Panama, and things sort of progressed from there in the third and fourth season.
The fifth season, which aired almost a decade after the show’s fourth season “series finale”, sort of retconned what happened in what was supposed to be the show’s final episode.
Obviously, though, the nine-episode fifth season was well-received and popular enough that FOX is willing to give Prison Break a sixth season, and maybe a seventh!
The fact that Prison Break will be back on our television screens should not really come as much of a surprise. After all, reviving long-dormant television series is all of the rage right now. For example, in 2013, streaming service Netflix revived the critically acclaimed FOX program Arrested Development, and it had been off the air for over seven years. In addition, Netflix created a sequel to the show Full House, which had been off the air for a couple of decades.
It should be very interesting to see what the new season of Prison Break offers viewers, as season five ended in such a way that all of the dangling plot threads were more or less tied up in a nice and satisfying way. We won’t spoil anything here, so go find a way to watch it!
It is unknown precisely when season six of Prison Break will air.
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