Written by Brett Johnson and Michael Tolkin, and directed by Ben Stiller, the series tells the story of the 2015 Clinton Correctional Facility escape, when Richard Matt ( Benicio Del Toro) and David Sweat ( Paul Dano) escaped the maximum security prison with the aid of civilian prison employee Joyce "Tilly" Mitchell ( Patricia Arquette). Excellently directed and beautifully shot, with a quartet of astounding performances at its centre, the show tells a fascinating story, but it moves at a glacial pace that requires serious patience, and which doesn't offer much in the way of rewards (although the last two episodes are undeniably exceptional). Ostensibly a prison break genre piece, the series is more interested in the psychology of the people involved than in either of the two usual routes for such stories triumphant escape or social commentary. And so we have the otherwise excellent Escape at Dannemora, a four or five-hour story elongated to eight hours. Except for one thing - "Netflix bloat" essentially, the phenomenon of TV shows having their stories stretched too thin across too many episodes. So, with that in mind, in an era where long-form narrative has become the norm, I should be in my element. The most egregious example I can think of is the fourth season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) (a serial offender in this respect), " Future Imperfect (1990)", in which one of the main characters adopts an alien, who was never to be seen or heard from again. And for as long as I've admired long-form narrative, I've disliked episodic storytelling, especially shows where the events of a given week seem to have little-to-no bearing beyond that one week. As far back as the late 80s/early 90s, long before "long-form narrative" would become the dominant mode of television storytelling, I was a fan of what would then have been called "non-episodic storytelling", the best-known examples of which would have been Michael Mann's Crime Story (1986) and David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (1990).
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