The folks at Fox have high hopes for their new series Alcatraz. The show starts out fifty years ago when the prison was being closed and all the prisoners were to be transported to other facilities. When the guards get to “the rock” they discover everyone is gone. They simply disappeared; vanished into thin air. The plot thickens when, flash forward to modern day, the missing prisoners turn up without having aged a day. Where have they been? What happened to them? And most importantly of all, the team must hunt them down and capture them before they continue their crimes. After all, Alcatraz held the worst of the worst.
At the January 2012 TCA Press Tour, the cast and showrunners talked about the show, its premise, and the characters.
Executive Producer Jennifer Johnson explained about the situation that makes this crime drama unique. “When we meet [these prisoners] present day, part of their unfinished business will be these tremendous and heinous crimes that they were pulling off in the past. And then the part that they haven't aged and that they feel that really no time has passed for them and they have the same venom and the same urgency in the cases they're fighting in the same crimes that they're perpetrating as they did in the past before they disappeared, presents our team with a unique challenge and makes them think differently than other cops do because these guys are ghosts. They have no credit card records. They barely know what a credit card is.”
Executive producer J. J. Abrams explained that the episodes contain flashbacks which add to the intense feeling of the story. “I would say that one of the fun things would be as the show progresses with that character that the existence in the flashbacks will be as important as the present?day history.”
The Cast of Alcatraz
Alcatraz stars Sam Neill as the head of the team tracking down the prisoners, Jorge Garcia as a leading Alcatraz expert who joins the team, and Sarah Jones as a San Francisco P.D. homicide detective who also joins the team. Each one of these characters has a special reason for their actions, all related to the notorious prison.
The cast shot part of the pilot in Alcatraz and were privy to areas where the public is not allowed, which they thought was, as Sarah Jones said, “pretty cool.”
Garcia’s character has been obsessed with the prison his whole life and is one of the foremost researchers about the prison and each of the prisoners, Sarah’s character thinks that her grandfather was a guard at the prison, and Sam’s character knows that there is a dark secret going on and is intent on getting to the bottom of it as well as rounding up the prisoners.
Sam Neill
Speaking about the actual prison, Sam Neil explained to the gathered journalists, “Just the name puts a shiver down my spine, you know? The charisma of that strange place is something that I believe has permeated the show. And when I first went out there, it was 15 years ago, it just struck me as being something surreally cruel about that isolation in full view of one of the most beautiful cities in the world ?? but imagine the cruelty of a prison where you sit behind bars looking at something as lovely as San Francisco and San Francisco is looking at you. That's such an incredibly harsh reality.”
Sarah Jones, Jorge Garcia and Sam Neill Star in Alcatraz
Viewers might recognize Sarah Jones from her previous television roles. She was in the short-lived series The Wedding Bells, appeared in Big Love and Sons of Anarchy, and played Belinda in some of the Love Comes Softly TV movies.
Jorge Garcia is best known for his role in the hit series Lost, in which he played Hurley. An interesting fact that Garcia brought out at the TCA Press Tour is that his girlfriend was writing a book about Alcatraz when he got the role.
Sam Neill is a veteran actor who has been in countless films and television shows.
Alcatraz premiers on Fox Monday, January 16, 2012
