Paul Scheuring writes one idea at a time, and when the idea is as good as a prison blueprint tattooed on a man's skin, it carries a whole season. His trouble has always been the episode after the idea runs out.
Fi1m perspective
A man takes his shirt off in a prison yard and the tattoos across his back are the plans of the building he is standing in. The guards search him every day and never find them. That is the whole of Prison Break (2005), and Paul Scheuring, who created it and wrote it, knew it: for one season every episode is a step in the plan and the thing that goes wrong with it, and that is enough. We felt, watching Wentworth Miller stand still while men patted him down, the pleasure of a trick that is plainly cheap and works anyway, and we stayed twenty-two hours to see how far it would go.
He came to it from the edges. 36K (2000) he wrote, directed and edited himself on almost nothing; A Man Apart (2003) he co-wrote for a studio. Fox turned the Prison Break pilot down and came back only after Lost had shown that a network audience would follow a puzzle. Scheuring ran the first two seasons, left, and did not return until the 2017 revival, which is worth knowing when our review says the four seasons after the first keep running and never arrive. He built the thing; other people kept it going, and they should have stopped. Since then he has written and directed The Experiment (2010), a remake of the German Das Experiment, created Zero Hour (2013) and the gold-rush miniseries Klondike (2014) with Ridley Scott producing, taken a story credit on Den of Thieves (2018) with his regular co-writer Christian Gudegast, and published two novels.
The pattern is plain. He likes a box with people in it (a cell block, an experiment, a frozen claim, a vault) and he likes the box to have rules. He has said of Prison Break that in the end "Either I save my brother or he dies", and the brother is what stops the tattoos being a gimmick. What he is less good at is the second idea. The later seasons of Prison Break swapped the building for a conspiracy and lost the tools and the waiting that made the first season work. We have not reviewed The Experiment, but the notices were unkind, mostly on the ground that the men in the cells are types rather than people, which is the fault a concept writer is always one draft away from.
He has said the novels give him room that television does not. On screen, his best work came with Dawn Parouse and Marty Adelstein producing, on Prison Break and again on The Experiment, and with a single question the whole thing had to answer. Watch the first season of Prison Break and stop where our review tells you to. The next good idea, when it comes, will be worth a season. Whether he is allowed to end it is another matter.
Biography
Paul T. Scheuring is an American screenwriter, director and producer. He was born on 20 November 1968 in Aurora, Illinois. He created the television series Prison Break (2005), on which he also served as writer, head writer and executive producer.
Scheuring wrote the screenplay for the film A Man Apart (2003). He wrote and directed The Experiment (2010) and wrote Den of Thieves (2018). He attended the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television and previously worked as a courier, cable installer and factory worker. In 2005 he signed an overall deal with 20th Century Fox.
