• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, April 4, 2017

For Fox, what's old is new again.

On Tuesday night, the old Fox show “Prison Break” (original airdate: 2005-09) becomes the third late, great Fox series to return recently from the now-distant past of the early- to mid-’00s.

Unless I’m forgetting some fourth series that achieved a similar resurrection on the Fox schedule in the past few years, the other two were “The X-Files” (original air date: 1993-2002; returned: 2016) and “24” (2001-10; returned in February as “24: Legacy”).

This new “Prison Break” is being billed by Fox as an “event” series, which means it intends to tell its new story over the course of this season, which will end later this spring.

These updated versions of the old shows live or die presumably on the affection their audiences once had for them -- and their hopes (and expectations) that the new versions will recapture the thrills they felt when watching the old ones.

Both “The X-Files” and this new “Prison Break” have been put together using the old casts, which was not the case with the new “24.”

With all of these old-show resurrections, Fox evidently seeks to reignite the old excitement, and in the process, draw the audiences these shows once attracted.

The problem with that plan lies in how much the TV business (i.e., “video content” business) has changed in the years since the original versions of these shows first aired.

Network TV shows today simply don’t draw audiences comparable to the ones they used to -- at least not in their first, “live” airings.

For example, just look at the viewership for the old “Prison Break.” In its four seasons, starting in 2005-06, the show averaged 9.2 million viewers (Season One), 9.3 million (Season Two), 8.2 million (Season Three) and 6.1 million (Season Four, 2008-09). 

How have times changed? Here in the tail end of the 2016-17 season, these averages would be nothing short of amazing.

During the week of 3/20-3/27/2017 -- the most recent week for which network prime-time averages are available -- the show that drew 6.1 million viewers was “Last Man Standing” on ABC. Under today's ratings standards, “Last Man Standing” is a network hit. It was ranked 22nd of all prime-time network shows that week. 

When “Prison Break” averaged 6.1 million viewers, it was ranked 68th among all prime-time shows for the 2008-09 season.

How is “24: Legacy” doing? During the same week referenced above, the show had 3.21 million viewers. The original “24” averaged 9.3 million viewers in its final season (2009-10).

With “Prison Break,” the only way the show will approximate its old audience will be to draw a portion of it on platforms after the show's episodes air in their time period on Tuesday nights.

On the face of it, based on a preview of the first two episodes provided by Fox, this new “Prison Break” might have a hard time drawing new viewers on top of the “Prison Break” faithful who loved the original series.

In this new one, brothers Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller, left, in the photo above) and Lincoln Burrows (Dominic Purcell, right) are back for another complicated prison breakout. This time, the prison is in Yemen, which makes the challenges far worse, since Yemen in the show -- and in real life -- is locked in a deadly civil war.

The Mideast setting in “Prison Break” -- with its scenes of gun-toting ISIS fanatics kicking in doors in rubble-strewn, bombed-out neighborhoods -- indicates that an Arab Spring has settled in at Fox, when you also take the terror-fighting agents of “24: Legacy” into account.

Whether or not “Prison Break” fans will accept some of the action sequences that have been choreographed for this new one is an open question. 

I always have a low tolerance threshold for scenes that don't ring true, such as one scene in the new “Prison Break” premiere in which Lincoln escapes injury when his car plunges into a ravine at high speed.

Miracle of miracles, he is thrown clear of the car in mid-plunge, possibly even headfirst through the windshield, and yet, he emerges unscathed and scarcely out of breath from this harrowing experience.

Other hard-to-believe moments come in Episode Two, when Lincoln commandeers an ISIS vehicle to rescue a group of schoolgirls from the clutches of the terrorists.

In a miracle of film editing, he suddenly appears crouching unnoticed outside the driver's door of this pickup truck (if memory serves), even though he was just moments before inside a house that was in the midst of being flooded with ISIS fighters. How he escaped from this house remains a mystery.

The new “Prison Break” premieres Tuesday night (April 4) at 9 Eastern on Fox.