E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Britons may be forgiven for waking up this morning thinking they are in a staging of Les Mis .  For today the news is this: benefit cheats can be imprisoned for up to ten years.  Now, I don't know about you, but that's the definition of draconian.  It may be morally repugnant to cheat the state of some money, but very few crimes legitimately warrant doing serious time in the klink.  Hard time is a serious thing to inflict on anyone - and it is likely to make a soft criminal a hardened one on release.  Rather than impose longer sentences for victimless crimes (the state is not a person), the state should find alternatives to cells, bars and Wormwood.

Fans of Prison Break (superb guilty pleasure suspense for 44 episodes ) will note that Season 3, of 13 episodes, (soon available on disc in the UK) was rudely (and thankfully) interrupted by the writer's strike - leading directly, this autumn, to a full Season 4. The series has resurrected its most beloved charater, Dr. Sara Tancredi . Eyewear , which had refused to watch the brutal new season due to its abrupt, cynical termination of the Tancredi character, may be tempted back to the fold. The series writers claimed the third season was about "redemption" - but Season 4 could really, be - for them.

Prison Break , the popular American TV series now in its 3rd season, has recently made a creative decision, based on behind-the-scenes problems, that will undoubtedly destroy the show's already-perilous hopes for any future life, or viewer loyalty. They have recently killed off the character of Dr. Sara Tancredi, the main love object of tattooed protagonist Michael Scofield. Over the first two seasons, their painful, complex relationship (based on using, being used, and getting over that) was at first enigmatic, then deeply moving, becoming the centre of an otherwise often simply ludicrous and hyper-violent spectacle. Sara was the emotional anchor of the show. Unfortunately, the actor playing her character, Sarah Wayne Callies , pictured, became, in "real life", pregnant, wanted out of the show, and refused, it is claimed, to co-operate with a third season 13-episode arc that would have had her death (one imagines) more artfully engineered. Instead, she was unceremoniousl...

Prison Break - one of American TV's best-loved and most entertaining guilty-pleasures of the 00s - set itself an intriguing structural challenge: the first season would be mostly set in a maximum security prison, and be all about attempted release from said constraint; the second season is about escaped convicts unleashed and on the run. In brief: control vs. chaos, or perhaps, formal versus free verse. If season one was poetry, season two of Prison Break is prose. The tone is different, and dissipated. One thinks of the difference between the films The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal - where, similarly, the issue was of order and escapade. Visions of Dr. Lecter strolling about sun-stroked Italy wearing a hat and carrying a Herald Tribune like a retired Interior Decorator from Des Moines was a let-down, to be sure. So too, the squalid squabbles of the "Fox River 8" once set out in the vast landscape that is America. But, thankfully, thematic and poetic elements surv...

America is a giant prison, and the bars are made of television screens. Maybe not, but fortress America has an incarceration problem - large numbers of its young populations are in prison. The rest just watch those that are. Prison Break (which appeared in the USA on politically-conservative Fox) is one of the best contemporary television programs, and, at times, achieves a pop culture giddiness that one only gets when in the presence of entertainment genius. Eyewear gives it four out of five specs. Fusing various elements (and cliches) from the original Mission: Impossible series, with The Great Escape , The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, The Birdman of Alcatraz, X-Files , and even Robin Hood , its series arc follows the semi-mythic TV paths of the mysterious, resourceful stranger who comes into a community ( Shane ) to redeem a lost world. No world could be more lost (other than Lost 's) or self-contained than a prison's - and no stranger-hero could be more thrilli...