Breakout Kings
Season One
13 Episodes 4 DVD
Fox Home Entertainment 2012
Breakout Kings is an original enough crime TV show with a good dose of violence. The premise is four cons are offered time off their sentences for each escaped convict they help capture. Fortunately, there are lots of prisons in the New York area and an escape every week. There is something Dirty Dozen like about this show in that the cons and their handlers all have their secrets, special skills, weird personalities, and agendas. Breakout Kings Season One features 13 episodes on 4 DVD.
The show is immediately formulaic: 1- breakout, 2- perp profile, 3- the agents and the cons going after the escapee based on information gleaned by the team’s computer wizard and, 4- missing their target by just a few minutes before the final showdown.
That said, Breakout Kings eminently watchable. The characters are interesting and grow from episode to episode. The escaped con of the week also has a different enough story to keep the viewer interested.
One minor weak point is that the episodes synopses on the menus are a little off sometimes.
There are a couple of howlers in Breakout Kings. One is in episode 3 where the perp has a prosthetic hand he removes to reveal he filed it into a shank. At the end of the episode he is cuffed around both wrists: there is nothing stopping him from removing the hand to either slip off the cuff or use the shank again. Another is episode four where a prisoner in protective custody magically makes it to the unprotected side of the jail just so he can set his escape in motion.