"Breakout Kings" Episode One Review
Is A&E’s new series worth a look? Here’s a review of the first episode.
Last night, Breakout Kings premiered on A&E. The network had been promoting the show for months, with ads for it in heavy rotation during broadcasts of its other series. Created by Nick Santora and Matt Olmstead, who wrote episodes of Prison Break, Kings puts an interesting spin on an old formula – federal marshals ally with a group of convicts to catch escaped prisoners. If the convicts try to escape, their sentences are doubled. Aiding the marshals capture the fugitives will shave some time off those sentences. But even with this plotline, is Kings worth watching?
The pilot episode sees the assembled team track down a fugitive named Tillman. The team is lead by a pair of U.S. Marshals, Charlie Duchamp and Ray Zancanelli (played by Laz Alonso and Domenick Lombardozzi). Joining them are a quartet of Zancanelli’s captures – Lloyd Lowery (Jimmy Stimson), a psychoanalyst and former child prodigy with expert knowledge of human behaviour, Shea Daniels (Malcolm Goodwin), a former gang member, Philomena “Philly” Rotchiffler, a former beauty queen convicted of fraud, and Fritz Gunderson, a cage fighter type with a taste for violence.
This episode has pretty straightforward plot. After the team is assembled, there are a series of escalating cat-and-mouse sequences leading to the concluding set piece. The episode moves along at a strong pace. The action never lets up long enough to allow the viewers’ interest to lag. Unfortunately, that pace leaves little time for character development. We meet the characters but never really get a strong sense of any potential storylines for them.
Most of the performances are good enough to get the job done and set the stage for the show. The true standouts in the cast are Stimson and Goodwin. Lowery, for all his intelligence, is a pathetic lech with definite mother issues and a racist streak. Shea is street-smart and confident, the sort of man who knows how to handle his business. The two characters contrast off each very well, especially in the scenes where Lowery’s racism appears.
There’s no doubt that Kings has style. A&E has obviously invested a fair amount of money in the series. The production values are high, with camera work and music really adding to the sense of atmosphere. The captions that appear when each of the prisoners are first introduced are witty. This humorous tone lightens up the proceedings a bit, keeping the show from cracking under the weight of its serious story.
Breakout Kings shows a lot of promise provided it takes the time to focus on, and develop, the characters a bit more. Action sequences might be exciting to watch, but a series can’t be based on action alone. Unless the next couple of episodes introduce some sub-plots based around those characters, Kings may end up joining the list of series that started out with an enjoyable pilot only to be quickly forgotten.
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“Breakout Kings” Episode 2 Review
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