Hit noughties crime drama Prison Break has experienced a revival in fortunes since its most recent outing on Netflix. The show has developed a cult following among a new generation of viewers, and has rocketed up the streaming charts as a result. Now, with its new audience hooked on the story of convicts Michael Scofield and Lincoln Burrows, Hulu has commissioned a reboot of Prison Break, which is currently in the works.

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If this reboot does end up being produced, it will add to the 88 episodes and one feature-length movie that the series has already racked up. Prison Break’s episodes span five seasons, including a fifth-season revival in 2017. The show’s seasons typically encompass 22 episodes, as the seasons of most serial dramas in the early 2000s did. However, season 3 runs much shorter at just 13 episodes, while season 5 has only nine. There’s a consensus that neither season features many of Prison Break’s best episodes, and they’re generally considered the two weakest chapters in the story.

Prison Break Season 3 Was Shorter Due To The 2007-08 Writers’ Strike

The Strike Coincided With Production Of The Season’s Second Half

The third season of Prison Break, in particular, compares unfavourably alongside seasons 1, 2 and 4, since it’s one of the four parts of the show’s original run on network television, between 2005 and 2009. The show was changed dramatically by the writers’ strike which fell right in the middle of its season 3 production run, during which all members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA) struck for more than three months between November 2007 and February 2008.

Producers had planned for the season to run for 22 episodes, as previous seasons had done, but the strike made this plan practically impossible. An entire narrative arc had to be scrapped, with the story curtailed and then stretched out across season 4, which saw Prison Break canceled until its revival almost a decade later. One of the longest strikes in the WGA’s history happened to coincide with a crucial moment in the development of Prison Break’s story, fundamentally altering the show’s course.

How Prison Break Season 3’s Shorter Episode Count Affected The Show

Storylines Were Radically Altered And Even Scrapped

Season 3 of the series focuses primarily on Scofield’s incarceration in and escape from the Penitenciaría Federal de Sona in Panama. Many viewers feel that the story retreads old ground from the first season, although its climactic escape unfolds in a very different way.

Nevertheless, it was supposed to be only partially about this escape, and was originally intended to revolve around the death of Scofield’s love interest Sara Tancredi, played by Sarah Wayne Callies. Instead, after Callies had skipped season 3 of Prison Break, her character returned at the start of season 4. The handling of Tancredi’s apparent murder had been rushed, and the plan to have Scofield avenge her had to be shelved during the strike.

What’s more, the third season was supposed to lay the groundwork for a spin-off series entitled Prison Break: Cherry Hill, by introducing some of its characters. Given that these characters were originally proposed to play a role in the second half of season 13, the shortening of this season led to the whole idea being scrapped. Season 4 continued where season 3 had effectively been cut off, except with the showrunners having “really wiped the slate clean”, according to executive producer Matt Olmstead (via Los Angeles Times). That meant Sara Tancredi’s head was uncut off, and the show’s direction shifted again.

Why Prison Break Season 5 Was Also Shorter Than Most Of The Seasons

The Revival Was Made For The Streaming Age

Several years later, the show was back by popular demand, as Fox revived Scofield (in more ways than one), Burrows and Tancredi with a nine-episode season for the streaming age. Actors Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell, who play Scofield and Burrows respectively, were the ones behind the idea of a revival. Fox jumped at the idea off the back of the show’s decent syndication numbers on streaming platforms, and commissioned a 10-episode limited series. The final result, coming in one episode short of Fox’s target, demonstrated that the idea behind Prison Break season 5 had been a big mistake.

Bringing back the same old characters in a revival was never going to work for this show, particularly given how the story had ended in season 4 and the TV movie Prison Break: The Final Break. The length of the revival season made sense, since shows numbering between six and 10 episodes are commonplace on streaming platforms. The age of the 22-episode season is now long gone. Prison Break’s original characters should have been long gone, too, and it’s telling that the upcoming series reboot won’t bring them back again.