At the dawn of twenty-four cable news station, we got inundated with these bizarre true crime stories about figure skaters who wacked their competition quite literal and women who cut off their husband’s manhood while they slept. A decade late, Nancy Grace rose to fame by spending whole episodes talking about missing hot white chicks. These cable networks would spend so much time on these types of stories it would become unwatchable at time.
But the thing is, I kind of miss those days because now it is ninety percent political news which is just a conservative nut job and a liberal windbag yelling at each other with us rational people in the middle wishing a pox on both their houses (which I think is the point because politicos have realized it is easier to get people not to vote than vote for you). Take the prison break in upstate New York a couple years back, a decade ago new it would have been wall to wall news for months, but in the summer of 2015 as the presidential campaigns were starting up, it barely made a blip and quickly faded from conscious after it was over.
Where the twenty-four news channels spend all their time reported on the latest stupid thing the president say, television and movies have picked up the slack on the retelling of the salacious news stories from OJ to the Menendez Brothers. Now that prison escape story from 2015 is getting its own true crime limited series on Showtime called Escape at Dannemore.
The show stars Benicio del Tora (Excess Baggage) and Paul Dano (Ruby Sparks) as the two prisoners who broke out of prison while Patricia Arquette (Little Nicky) is the prison work supervisor who helped them escape while David Morse (Treme) is another worker at the prison. Bonnie Hunt (Rain Man) also shows up as the Inspector’s General of New York.
I was a bit surprised at the format of the series. I assumed the manhunt would be the heart of the series, but that does not even begin until the final episode while the show starts in the winter of the escape that happened during the summer. Granted that final episode runs an hour and forty minutes (the show was originally announced as an eight episode miniseries so it seems like they just combined what was supposed to be the last two).
So really this comes off more as a six episode mini-series of how they escaped and then crammed the twenty-three day manhunt into a feature length movie. I do wonder if the show would have been better off evening the show between planning and escape because the planning episodes drag at times. And just when you start wondering if they ever revealed what exactly these two prisoners to land themselves in prison, we do get some graphic flashbacks showing us exactly what happened.
It was also a little disappointing that the whole show is not as weird as the trailer would have me believe. Sure Arquette and her on screen husband make interesting choices but must and other things get weird from time to time, but this is mostly a straight movie based on a weird story. Del Toro plays the suave inmate who paints portraits of Hilary Clinton (yeah, that is one of the weird parts) while Dano is the follower in the situation.
The musical choices are also interesting. Sure this is a period show, but that period was only three years ago. Apparently Uptown Funk was so invasive back in 2015 that it even got overplayed in prison. I was also weird to think we actually let Meghan Trainor to be a thing and this happened just a couple years ago.
Though the show takes it’s time in places, it does go to some interesting places. Part of the escape includes crawling through a pipe and you really feel the claustrophobic as one of the prisoner only goes a small distance. And when we get a long tracking shot from the jail cell to outside the prison, it is beautiful.
Escape at Dannemora airs Sundays at 10:00 on Showtime.
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