"Prison Break" reboots

Left to right: "Prison Break" EPs Paul Scheuring and Matt Olmstead with cast members Dominic Purcell and Wentworth Miller at the press session in Pasadena.

A year ago at this time, many of the nation’s TV critics were thinking along these lines: OK, the "Prison Break" succeeds. Then what?

That’s the challenge the producers of Fox’s hit serial will face when it begins its second season Aug. 21, less than a month from today.

Few details, understandably, were revealed to critics when the cast and crew appeared for a preview on Monday.

This we know: The mad scheme of Michael (Wentworth Miller) to get sent to prison and break out his brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), following an elaborate map tattooed to his body, somehow worked. If you missed the fun, the Aug. 21 season opener will be written so that viewers new to the show "can catch up to everything," producer Paul Scheuring said.

The action of Season 2 moves from inside prison to outside. Principal filming, which took place last year at the shuttered penitentiary in Joliet, Ill., will shift to Dallas.

"We’re opening up the visual look of the show, and I think people are going to be surprised," Scheuring said. Basically, it’s going to look and feel like a whole different series. "This is not an insular, visually claustrophobic show where everything’s done on green screen. We’re going to see a lot of parts of America. We’re going to see a lot of helicopter shots."

Some of the actors will look different, too. Robert Knepper, who plays the scary one-handed escapee T-Bag, showed up at the press session with blond hair. Going incognito is essential, he explained, because "I don’t want the cops to look stupid."

Just because they’re on the lam doesn’t mean the ex-prisoners won’t find a way for their lives to intersect, especially those who viewers have gotten used to seeing together, such as Michael and his cellmate, Sucre (Amaury Nolasco).

"I think one of the best things about ‘Prison Break’ is not just the mechanics of the escape and the tattoo and the blueprints and the ‘MacGyver’-esque shenanigans," Miller said. "It’s the relationships that we have as actors and as characters. And it would be a real shame if the odd-couple bond between Sucre and Michael were to simply fall by the wayside just because we’ve hopped over the wall."

Overheard

Also overheard at Pasadena:

"The truth is clearly he has no viewers except those he gets when he attacks Fox News and, particularly, continuing to attack Bill and, therefore, his family. And I really think that’s over the line." -- Fox News chief Roger Ailes, responding to more attacks on his top personality, Bill O’Reilly by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, who has named O’Reilly the winner of his daily "Worst Person in the World" honor 100 times.

"You probably shouldn’t do comedy during the day is what I learned. They were great sports about it. And they have a much bigger career than I do. So I think that’s why they were fine with it." -- comedian Brad Garrett, reflecting on a poorly received performance at Fox’s fall previews in May, where he suggested Paula Abdul was in a mental hospital and made a dirty joke about Ryan Seacrest’s sexuality. Garrett, formerly of "Everybody Loves Raymond," plays an unhappy hubby in the Fox comedy "’Til Death" this fall.

"I don’t have to wait in line as long at nightclubs." -- Ron Livingston of the new hostage-negotiator drama "Standoff," on how being on "Sex and the City" has helped his career.

"I play the ex-wife to the senator and the mother of these beautiful children -- the very young mother, by the way." -- actress Penelope Ann Miller, describing her part on the new Fox thriller "Vanished." The show, which follows the disappearance of the senator’s current wife, is structured much like current Fox hits "24" and "Prison Break."

"I think I’m going to be dead and buried before ‘The Simpsons’ ever gets removed from our air." -- Fox network entertainment president Peter Liguori