This post is about an interesting story related to me by an acquaintance of mine who works on the set of the Fox Network drama Prison Break, concerning the return to the show of Sarah Wayne Callies, and the true feelings towards her among the other stars and cast members. It will require some amount of background, but I promise you its worth wading through it if you’re a fan of the show, or if you just want an idea of the behind the scenes shenanigans of the cast of a network television drama.It’s interesting and at the same time infuriating for me to watch how the Fox Network is going about the business of destroying one of my favorite shows, Prison Break. At one time, it was a pulse-pounding adrenaline rush, with great acting and scripts, flawlessly executed and directed with great cinematography. It still is all that, but it has gone down some, as all series television will, even the best of them. Well, let’s be honest, the concept of the show hinted at a limited run, and in fact it was first devised as a mini-series. It evolved from there to a series, and is now in its fourth season. Originally it revolved around a guy trying to break his wrongly-convicted brother out of the prison which he himself had helped design, by having himself sent to the same prison, and breaking out. Along the way, he picked up a cadre of associates, some by design, but others through discovery and resultant extortion.
Season One ended with a grand total of eight escapees breaking out, while another died in the attempt and yet a tenth was apprehended. Season Two followed the pursuit of the convicts, who had gone their separate ways. Over the course of the season, three of them would meet their demise at the hands of the rogue FBI agent assigned to track them down but who was in reality working for the same shadowy “Company” responsible for the false imprisonment of the older brother. This organization has members at the highest level of government and industry, including the then-President of the United States. The season reached it’s near-conclusion with her stepping down, but the two brothers-Michael Scoffield (Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell) were obliged to leave the country, the company still tracking their movements to Panama where-lo and behold-they have an agent currently held in a prison called Sona.
The mysterious company boss who up until now has said very little, communicating with his subordinates chiefly by way of handwritten notes (due to paranoia over satellite surveillance), decides to make lemon out of lemonade. He tells his subordinate, Bill Kim, to murder Lincoln Burrows, somehow inexplicably and unexplainably frame Scoffield, arrange for his incarceration in Sona, and somehow hope that he can be convinced to break their comrade out of the hellish prison. Things don’t go exactly according to plan. Kim is killed by Sarah Tancredi (Sarah Wayne Callies) the prison doctor and daughter of the late Illinois Governor whom Michael manipulated as part of his complex escape plan from Fox River, who subsequently attempted suicide, recovered only to find herself out of a job and in danger or prosecution, and the target of one Agent Kellerman (Paul Adelmann), the murderous company operative who has been the chief enforcer for the Company up until this point. When he sees just how expendable he himself is, he betrays the company and saves the brothers and Tancredi, and then is later apparently murdered.
Nevertheless, by the end of Season Two, Scoffield, who has taken the blame for the murder of Kim to protect Tancredi, is, of course, sent to Sona. By the time the unfortunately abbreviated season three begins, it looks like the gang is all here. Scoffield is joined by Agent Mahone (William Fichtner), his chief antagonist for Season Two who himself runs afoul of the Panamanian authorities; by Brad Bellick, the disgraced season one Chief Corrections Officer of Fox River turned season two bounty hunter; and by Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell (Robert Knepper), the murderous rapist pedophile who in season one extorted his way in on the escape plan, and who in season two left a bloody trail that stretched from Illinois, to Kansas, to Atlanta, and on down to Mexico and Panama.
Season Three’s Sona was a different situation. There were no guards since an earlier prison riot, though guards controlled the outer perimeter of the prison to prevent escapes, and delivered supplies. The straw boss of the prison was a drug lord named Norman St. John, called Lechero due to his earlier brutal murder of the man who raped his immigrant mother, which he accomplished by disguising himself as a milk man. He received compensation in the form of various considerable privileges in return for running Sona on the inside as a kind of controlled chaos that amounted to survival of the fittest.
The Company wanted Scoffield to find and break out James Whistler (Chris Vance), one of its operatives who had a secret coded book that contained information they needed. They did this by abducting the aforementioned Sarah Tancredi and L J Burrows (Marshall Almann), who is Scoffields nephew and Burrows’s son. Scoffield eventually accomplished the task while simultaneously tricking Bellick and Bagwell into being captured, along with Lechero, who was shot by the guards and subsequently murdered by Bagwell. Nevertheless he escaped with Whistler and a young car thief named MacGrady, along with Mahone, while his good buddy Fernando Sucre’ (Amaurie Nolasco) one of the original “Fox River Eight”, was captured and imprisoned within Sona for aiding in the escape by getting a job at Sona as a grave digger.
Scoffield managed to deliver the goods in the form of Whistler, who had lost the bird book (which was found by Bagwell) and rescued his nephew from the clutches of the evil Gretchen Morgan (Jody Lynn O’Keefe), but it was too late for Sarah Tancredi, who Morgan had earlier beheaded as a warning shot heard round the world. There were screams and gasps and cries of horror, grief, and outrage when the dastardly deed culminated in the head delivered in a box to the rented room of Lincoln Burrows-not from Burrows, however, nor even from Scoffield, but from the so-called MiSa fans who wrote petitions and trolled fan sites demanding that the show revive Tancredi, who had actually left the show due to a contractural dispute.
See, they had originally intended her suicide attempt at the end of Season One to be successful, but some of the brass balked on that idea and decided the Scoffield/Tancredi relationship had dramatic potential. By the end of Season Two, Sarah Wayne Callies was pregnant, and so was not available for a good part of Season Three, at which point somebody decided to kill her off during the fall finale, around episode thirteen. She refused to play along, and so they killed her off in episode three.
Thanks to the deluge of e-mails, letters, and phone calls from MiSa fans, however, Fox relented, and now Sarah Tancredi is back for Season Four, much to the chagrin of the larger portion of fans who would just as soon she stayed dead and gone. Any relationship between these two in the real world would be based on guilt. Sure, forgiveness is fine, but the fact is, the “chemistry” between these two is nonexistent at best, and it shows. In fact, it adds nothing to the show. Nothing, nada, zilch. The people who make up the MiSa Universe are obviously gay guys and teenage virgins, along with not a few sexually frustrated women who probably have their fingers up their cunts every time these two are on the screen together, though why for the life of me I will never know. Living vicariously through television romances are never the sign of a healthy emotional state. I have an idea it has something to do with broken romances and betrayals in their own lives that never worked out to their own satisfaction.
Be that as it may, Fox Networks evidently saw the opportunity to boost ratings on the show, and Wentworth Miller, being the good company man he is, has assured us all he is happy that Callies has returned to the show. Of course this is bullshit.
It’s always good to know people who work in Hollywood, especially when it is people who work behind the scenes of your favorite television show. I in fact know three such people who work on Prison Break, though unfortunately I have fallen out of contact with one, who happens to be the one I procured this picture from.
One of the others has kindly shared with me the story of how not only Miller really feels about Callie, but a great many other of the show’s cast as well. Following is a reproduction on an e-mail he sent me regarding my queries. Naturally, I can’t reveal the name of the individual or his position at Fox Network of on the show. Be that as it may, the following is his description of an occurrence on the set one day after the filming of Episode Three and Four, at the beginning of which Lincoln Burrows peered into the box left at his home to see the head of Sarah Tancredi. It seems that the head in question was a set piece around the studios for quite a few days, almost you might say a decoration that was the subject of a considerable amount of mirth and camaraderie. The way he puts it-
But they had the head on the sets a couple of days. When they had it over at the indoor set all the guy actors were there that day and were, well, being guys...trying to out-macho each other. First Wade walks in with it in his pants - those tony tiger pants - so it looked like he had a giant tumor. Wentworth is the first one to reach into Wades pants and pull the head out (that sounds dirty!). He puts the mouth up to his crotch holding it by the hair with one hand, slapping it with the other saying s*** like "Yeah take that bitch. Teach you to complain about screen time". They pretty much all took turns and all of 'em (except Knepper if I remember) had the head in their crotch calling her bitch, save some for me, etc. It was pretty raunchy. There were only about five or eight of us there that day and only a couple of us standing around to the side watching. They all took pictures and had the head sitting in SWC's chair (odd they kept it!) and again putting both their crotch and ass in the head's face. I grabbed one of the makeup ladies walking by, she was laughing so hard she was crying, and asked her right out if they really hated her that much. She told me YES, they could not stand the sight of her.
It was kind of fun!
So there you have it. I would like to see the show return to its former ratings, but if those of the last two weeks are any indication, this might be unlikely. The phony relationship between Miller and Tancredi is a drain on the show, and I have an idea the morale of the cast is probably at an all-time low. After all, there aren’t many of them who have a shot at returning in the event the studios decide they are no longer needed.
In fact, Wade Williams, who has played Brad Bellick since the beginning of the show and is in the current season now an ally of Scoffield, and like him is one of the group procured by Agent Don Self (Michael Rappaport) to help bring down the Company, is set to be killed off in episode nine. The discovery of his body in the sewers causes a problem for the operation. All of them involved in the operation-Scoffield, Burrows, Bellick, Sucre, Tancredi, Mahone, and a new character who is a young nerdy computer hacker-are officially supposed to be in a Supermax prison, the cover story invented to disguise the true nature of their work on the outside. (T-Bag of course is working at cross purposes against them and over time will become allied with Gretchen).
When Bellick dies, they all learn the truth. They are being used by the people conducting the operation to bring down the Company, and these people have no intention of honoring their previous commitments to them as expressed by Self. Bellick's body will be kept in cold storage, his remains will not be turned over to his mother, nor will he get the funeral he and the others were promised. His reward is a space in a morgue freezer, where his demise will remain unknown and unmourned.
So one of the best actors on the show is soon to be gone, while the mediocre at best Callies is probably safe from now until the series finally ends, more than likely after this season concludes. Its just too bad the Fox Network executives have not caught on to the idea that Callies role is not only not needed, but for the majority of fans, it might even be said to be unwanted and possibly to an extent even resented.
But she bitches about her screen time.
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