Alcatraz - Monday - 9pm ET - FOX
LOST ended almost 2 years ago, now and I haven't really found anything that comes close to taking it's place for it's sheer "What the hell is going on, and what's going to happen next?" factor.
J. J. Abrams' Alcatraz doesn't quite fill that hole, but it's come the closest anything else has in the last two years for me. Staring Sam Neill, Sarah Jones and LOST's Jorge Garcia, the show is a mix between LOST, Men in Black, NYPD Blue.
The premise of the show is that when Alcatraz closed in 1963, the inmates weren't moved. Instead everyone on the island disappeared. Now, in the modern days the missing inmates are coming back looking exactly how they were when they disappeared. They usually have some soft of mission that goes back to why they were incarcerated in the first place, a tale that's told with flashbacks to the early 1960's.
Sarah Jones plays a SFPD detective that stumbled on the mystery (the story is in the first episode "Pilot"), Jorge Garcia plays a nerd with two doctorates who has written multiple books about Alcatraz and it's inmates. Sam Neil is the hard-assed, secret-keeping organizer of the group. They all work together to capture the escapee by trying to figure out where he/she will go next based on the information they have from their prison records and personal effects.
The first four episodes so far have been great, and I find myself sitting around anxiously waiting the next episode. The potential is there for it to get stale, but as long as they keep baiting me with back stories on the organization that's hunting the inmates down, why it exists, where the inmates have been, who sent them, and what they're after.
Alcatraz airs Mondays at 9ET on Fox it stars Sam Neill, Sarah Jones and Jorge Garcia. It's produced by J. J. Abrams
