What Year Is It?

What the hell is going on, here? I thought the show about the guys breaking out of prison ended like eight years ago. Now I am seeing commercials that are all like This Tuesday ... [grim men looking at each other through chain-link fence] ... on Fox ... [sooty-faced men being serious] ... you can never ... [prison guards doing things] ... escape ... [grim man telling other grim man “We’re gonna get you out of here”] ... your past ... [I dunno, like a fistfight or whatever] ... Prison Break season premiere at (whatever time of night).

What???? This show is from a long time ago! Isn’t it? I definitely feel like there were commercials on TV for this show when George W. Bush was the president. Have I slipped through a rip in space-time or some shit?

Is this a new breaking-out-of-prison show? A reboot? I feel like some sort of acknowledgement is due, otherwise. We know ... [prison guard banging on a pipe or something] ... this is extremely weird ... [men in blue jumpsuits milling around] ... but this show ... [“Hey man, how come we are in prison again?”] ... that has been off the air for nearly an entire decade ... [light glinting off a shiv blade] ... is back. Was the breaking-out-of-prison show even all that popular the first time? Is there some broad demand for a continuation of the story about these two grim men with extremely short hair trying to break each other out of prison?

I must confess, here, that I have only the flimsiest idea what the breaking-out-of-prison show was about in the first place. I think they’re brothers, and like one of them goes to prison on purpose because the other one is in prison and he wants to get him out? How many years does that take? At some point you have to change the name of the show to Not Breaking Out Of Prison Actually. Certainly when you are picking the thread back up like eight years later and these bozos are still in prison. They’re not breaking out of prison! They’re just in prison. The In-Prison Brothers, on Fox. What Prison Is Like For These Two Guys Who Live There, on Fox.

This ad makes it seem like maybe they are in ISIS prison now. I think you have to be pretty bad at breaking out of regular prison if your efforts land you in ISIS prison. Maybe these guys are just a couple of stupid doofuses. In another 20 years we’ll get a season where they’re trying to break out of a mine shaft at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Cast down your bucket where you are, In-Prison Brothers! You’re only making it worse!

Imagine if ABC just started running promos that had Larry and Balki grimacing at each other across a kitchen counter and expected you to just naturally not be weirded out by there suddenly being a new season of Perfect Strangers. What in the hell is going on in the world today.