10 TV Shows That Peaked In Their First Season
3. Prison Break
At the heart of Prison Break is a truly brilliant premise, as a man deliberately gets himself incarcerated with a prison blueprint tattooed on his body in order to break his brother out from the inside.
However, the very nature of it is a single idea; a trick which can only realistically be pulled off once. It was designed as a miniseries, and you can see the fingerprints of that on Season 1.
Steven Spielberg was even slated at one point to be in charge of it, but this changed when Fox decided to go for a recurring seasons show. With nine million viewers during its debut run, Fox okayed an extra string of episodes, culminating in the prisoners actually completing the titular prison break.
Season 2, with the prisoners on the run, had a little bit of intrigue and drama as well, but beyond that it just became a silly mess of government conspiracy theories. Wentworth Miller played enigmatic lead Michael Scofield well, but not enough to save it.
It is hard to think exactly where the show should’ve gone, but clearly it went for the wrong option.