Fair use of TV photo from Alcatraz official website.

In the world of television, you can either hit, or you can miss. The new show “Alcatraz” was most definitely a miss.

FOX, the network that airs the new show, never once missed a chance to hype up the fact that this show was going to be just as good or even greater than the hit drama “Lost,” which finished its sixth and final season around two years ago. They threw around the famous names that worked on the show such as superstar director Steven Spielberg, hoping that that would be enough to draw in the audience of pop culture fans. And it worked. Online, there was great anticipation of a new Masterpiece that was sure to be the most amazing thing on television since “Lost”. But ever since the premier, the loud chatter has fallen to a barely audible whisper, if that.  

In this new show, the main plot includes how the famous criminals that were originally imprisoned on the island prison of Alcatraz somehow disappeared when it closed. Or as the opening title of the show narrates it: “All of the prisoners were transferred off the island…only that’s NOT what happened.” This is not only blatantly obvious due to the description of the show on FOX’s website, but it also makes no sense, because even when you start watching the show itself, it doesn’t bother explaining at all what really DID happen. There are so many questions left unanswered, and the only reason they don’t bother at all to go into a little detail on what happened to these “lost prisoners” is because the producers are trying way to hard to make this show like its incredibly successful predecessor “Lost.” They thought that having a similarly intricate plot would be more popular among old fans of this past show. But really, this is just sad.

Do the creators of this show really have to ride the wave of their past successes in order to try to gain popularity with a new show? The answer is no. When you have such a creative team that can come up with such amazing ideas for shows (as seen from their other work on the network), they don’t need to rehash the past in order to be successful. All they have to do is work hard, think, and know the difference between just using old ideas and completely copying the pace of another show.

Now some people may say that it’s too early to tell whether the show will be as good or better than any other show, specifically “Lost”. But, a quick comparison can show otherwise. All shows begin as a blank canvas. Their creators have limitless opportunity do do pretty much all they desire; they are only limited by their imaginations. In Lost, the audience had as little idea where the show took place as the plane crash victim – characters did. They could be anywhere and there was really no limit to what surprises the setting might throw at them. But in “Alcatraz” the setting is the incredibly popular and fairly small city of San Francisco, which, I have to say, is a tad bit limited than a huge  mysterious island in the middle of the Pacific ocean. In “Lost,” there was no goal in the beginning except getting off the island and back to civilization, and several other major plot points were altered and introduced as the show progressed. In Alcatraz, the entire plan for every episode in the future was laid out for us on the first night that it aired on television. To bring all of the escaped prisoners to justice and to find out how they disappeared all those years ago. Now, this sounds interesting, but how long can they keep that up? Certainly not for six seasons like the show it is so desperately trying to repeat the success of! There are over 300 prisoners and 40 guards in the story, and each episode so far has been about catching ONE of them. I’m not thinking it’s just me speculating that this will get real boring real fast.

The one upside to the show? The hope that it will get turned around in the very near future. I have faith that the fate of the show is not entirely doomed yet. All they need to do is start putting FOX’s trademark creativity that has worked wonders in the past into the show, and then, I think that the worldwide audiences will have a masterpiece to watch at last.

By CARSEN VAN DER LINDEN