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Fox's Prison Break is the second-most popular show on Netflix right now. Not bad for a show that ended seven years ago.

The incendiary penitentiary drama debuted 19 years ago as a surprise hit, starring Wentworth Miller and Lincoln Pursell as two ride-or-die brothers - one trying to break into prison so he could break the other out. Over five seasons, a TV movie, and even a crossover with another TV franchise, it had a grand finale in 2017. But now, as it debuted on Netflix earlier this month, it's become the latest in a line of older TV shows finding a new audience (or finding its old audience, again) on the largest streaming platform in the world.

Currently, Prison Break occupies three of Netflix's top 10 TV shows spot - for seasons 1, 2, and 3 - with an accumulated 134.8m hours watched in just the past seven day. That beats the #1 show The Perfect Couple, and the highly-vaunted Emily in Paris season 4B - all based on what folks of a certain generation would dub 'reruns.' This gives me renewed hope in the long-simmering plans for a Prison Break spinoff.

As reported last year by Deadline, Disney - which acquired Prison Break as part of the pop-culture megadeal when it bought most of the assets of 20th Century Fox - has greenlit development on a sequel to Prison Break with a new cast and a new prison. The show is being helmed by a veteran crime TV showrunner (who also spent a year in prison), Mayan MC's Elgin James. 

James' pitch for the new Prison Break series was a new start - not a reboot, but a new prison drama set in the continuity of Prison Break that conspicuously leaves the door open for surprise returns from the original show. Like many of its adult-oriented TV shows, Disney slotted the Prison Break revival in at Hulu.

This isn't the first time this has been tried. Back in 2007, there was heavy development in a concurrent Prison Break spinoff with an aim to turn the series into a franchise ala CSI: Miami, Law & Order: SVU, etc etc. Years before Netflix's Orange is the New Black, there was development on a women's prison spinoff titled Prison Break: Cherry Hill following an "upper-middle-class housewife" named Molly. The show was thrown off the tracks but he 2007-2008 Writer's Guild of America strike, and deprioritized as Fox looked to rebuild its main shows before taking risks on something new.

As we all continue to enjoy watching the exploits of good people making bad choices (and sometimes bad people making bad choices), a new Prison Break in 2025 is not something I had planned to look forward to. But after re-watching the early seasons of Prison Break this month with a few hundred thousand other people thanks to Netflix I am once again hopeful (and hooked).

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