NBC picks up drama about a prison break, but in the future

By Sean O'Neal | August 12, 2013 | 9:26pm

Aux Features TV

A master of taking things that are already perfectly good stories and then adding another thing plus his name, Pride And Prejudice And Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith has done it again with the NBC drama Paradise, which takes your ordinary prison drama but—in a twist that changes everything—adds The Future. Grahame-Smith and producer Greg Berlanti will team on the show that already has a put pilot commitment at NBC, who likely heard the pitch “prison drama” and started to pass, only to have Grahame-Smith suddenly dim the lights and intone, in a heavily reverbed voice, “…but in The Future.”

And indeed, Paradise takes place in the late 21st century, in a Las Vegas that’s been transformed into the world’s largest maximum-security prison, rather than a trap that similarly drains your will to live but also has cheap steak dinners. When a doctor finds himself imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit, and is therefore technically not a fugitive, he becomes determined to make a prison break—though not a Prison Break, because that didn’t take place in The Future—and escape from Las Vegas. Not New York. Again, this is an original idea, plus The Future.