A&E’s ‘Breakout Kings’ off to a pretty good start

If you’ve got a criminal on the loose, the best thing you can do, I suppose, is release four more.

That’s the theory behind A&E’s new crime serial “Breakout Kings.”

The title refers to a group of ne’er-do-wells cobbled together as a task force by the U.S. Marshal’s service. When a convict makes a break for it, they are released from their minimum security prison and if they catch the bad guy, they get a month shaved off their sentence.

This works better as a television show, I think, than it would in real life. In the world of the show, Philly, Shea, Lloyd and -- well, this other one they’ve already gotten rid of because he stole a butter knife at a cafe -- all answer to an ex-con named Ray, who was recruited by a U.S. Marshal named Laz.

Ray recruited them because they were the toughest escapees he’d ever helped track, so in theory, they know the ropes -- how to get out of the prison and how to stay out -- or more so, I suppose, than the ones who were easier to catch.

Among the cons, there’s a mix of brains, brawn and guile. There’s a mix of men and women -- the butter knife guy is replaced by a woman in upcoming episodes. There’s frank and pragmatic discussion of race and propensity for various infractions among a racially diverse crew.

Their first mission is to track a co-conspirator in a bank robbery, who escaped by very cleverly conditioning himself to cling for several minutes to the underside of a truck leaving the prison yard, and crafted a camouflage from battered license plates.

He went after his co-conspirators to recover the money, and took one of their daughters as a hostage to flee to Canada, attaching a bomb to her along the way.

Pursuit

While I find that this is incredibly resourceful, I enjoyed the cat-and-mouse aspect of the pursuit. I also enjoyed the trace of Asperger’s that actor Jimmi Simpson incorporated into his portrayal of Lloyd. His character is mild and unassuming, and you don’t necessarily know where he’s going in his various lines of questioning.

I suspect these types of characters are the most interesting to write. It certainly feels like they would be fun characters to portray. Like Ducky in “NCIS,” you never know what they’re going to say next.

“Breakout Kings” was created by the team behind the four-season FOX drama “Prison Break,” so you suspect they have a bit of a fixation. I imagine they had all sorts of brilliant ideas in the course of that development but they had to focus on Michael Scofield and his outlandish schemes to break his brother out of prison and expose corruption in the top levels of our nation’s government. Now they can write more episodically – each episode can focus on a different escapee.

Even so, the show already has a big bad in the offing. Professional bad apple Robert Knepper is reprising his role as Theodore “T-Bag” Bagwell from the “Prison Break” series in at least a four-episode arc.

This is interesting, because the character of T-Bag wasn’t really a runner. Until he latched onto Michael Sco-field in his jailbreak from Fox River, he was content to carve out a harem and a comfortable little life for himself. Maybe that’s not as possible these days with his prosthetic hand and all, but on some level you’d think it would heighten his appreci-ation for creature comforts.

I guess we’ll see how much they pull in from that series. I know it’s a cable series, but to me it feels like it stands well enough on its own, and they shouldn’t be afraid to create completely new characters and situations. It shouldn’t become an appendix, a morose recital of “where are they now?” from another series -- one that already came to its own, perfectly satisfying conclusion.

However it progresses, it has gotten off to a good enough start. New episodes of “Breakout Kings” premiere Sundays at 10/9c on A&E, and encore several times throughout the week.