"Next season is chaos, man."
This is what Paul Scheuring says when I ask about Season 2 of Prison Break, which begins shooting today in Dallas.
Chaos? How so?
"We scatter these guys to the four corners of the country," he says, leaning forward, eyes widening. "They are all free. We have let guys literally out of a cage to do what they want to do. And they all have their various end-games which we established in Season 1."
We’re in an interview suite at the Banff World Television Festival, which concluded yesterday. Scheuring is wearing a blue shirt. He has short-cropped brown hair, a deep voice and intense gaze which makes him seem more like a military officer than a TV show runner.
This season concluded, recall, with Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) and the escaped cons sprinting through a field. Police sirens wailed. The cops were getting close. But, as Scheuring explains, breaking out of Fox River Penitentiary was the easy part.
"Comparatively, they were very safe in the prison," he says. "Now they are behind enemy lines."
Fans who were enthralled by the first season can expect to be shocked by what awaits. (Warning: if you want nothing spoiled, do not read after the jump.)
(Continued before the jump)
"The audience will be amazed," he says. "Our main characters are going to start falling by the wayside. We kind of say this in jest, but it’s true. Season 2 is like our American Idol season.
"Because we start with eight guys on the run and slowly one guy gets popped, and one guy gets popped, and one guy gets popped. Pretty soon there’s only one guy left standing."
He takes a deep breath.
"It’s going to be strange for the audience. They’re going to go, `My God, they’re all gone! They killed that person!’ And we’re really excited about that because they’ll know we’re not pulling any punches. We’re not doing anything for commercial reasons."
This year, he says, the biggest challenge was: "Would the audience swallow the whopper that we served, which was this guy had tattoos on his body to start a prison break."
The other problem, he says, was wondering if viewers (especially female) would watch a show set in "the milieu of prison." But when the pilot was shown to a test audience, women actually scored higher.
Scheuring attributes this to the show’s web of mysteries, to the emotionally resonant relationships and, most important, to the casting of Miller: "manna from the heavens."
Miller, he says, is "like catnip to women." And he got the role only after producers had seen about 200 other actors in L.A.
"None of them were right," Scheuring says. "They were all tired, boring, `actor’ guys, and not true ciphers and mysteries and enigmas that we needed for Scofield. I had never heard of Wentworth Miller. But he just walked into the room that day and I said, `We got him. We got the guy.’"
Given the show’s gritty backdrop and, at times, the brutal situations, was there anything Scheuring could not do or show this season?
"We didn’t get to say `Jesus Christ’ ever because we were censored," he says. "We could cut off toes and cut off hands and we could do various things like that. But we could never take the Lord’s name in vain because, I guess, Fox was very worried about angering the religious right."
In addition to Prison Break, Scheuring just completed a movie script about the Yucatan journals of the late actor Steve McQueen. He will also direct an indie film in March.
"If you have some success in Hollywood — if you have any kind of product that sells and connects with an audience — all of a sudden the networks and studios and everybody think, `They must have some magic.’ That’s debatable. But when people are throwing projects at you, you don’t dive out of the way."
As for Prison Break, which will be renamed this summer, Scheuring says he’s already mapping out the third season even though his initial concept was for two years.
"We have found a way, in principle, to have a reinvention in Season 3 with some of the same characters, but a very different milieu and very different tone.
"So it will go on."
[The Star]
