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FOX 'Alcatraz' brings thriller genre back to television (VIDEO)

By April MacIntyre Jan 16, 2012, 16:43 GMT

01/11/2012 - Jorge Garcia - "Alcatraz" Premiere Party and Screening on Alcatraz Island on January 11, 2012 - Alcatraz Prison - San Francisco, CA, USA © Jonathan Shensa / PR Photos

J.J. Abrams' latest effort for FOX is a supernatural drama that takes place at the infamous prison in San Francisco Bay.

The executive producer (Lost) he uses Jorge Garcia once again plays eccentric historian Diego Soto (a specialist on the prison), who teams up with Detective Rebecca Madsen (Sarah Jones) to track down Alcatraz’s former prisoners.

This chilling new drama follows a unique trio who investigate the shocking reappearance of Alcatraz’s most notorious prisoners 50 years after they vanished.

These prisoners disappeared mysteriously in the 1960s and are now turning up, as if frozen in time, never aging.

Emerson Hauser (Sam Neill), is inttroduced as a government agent devoted to recapturing the hardened criminals.

The series sees director Jack Bender, executive producers Daniel Pyne, Jennifer Johnson, and J.J. Abrams, and stars Jorge Garcia, Sarah Jones, and Sam Neill. All of whom appeared at the recent Television Critics' Association winter press tour to discuss the drama.

EP Johnson says, "Alcatraz is notorious, and the criminals who were housed there were the worst of the worst and part of their crimes are somewhat reflective of their time. So when we meet them present day, part of their unfinished business will be these tremendous and heinous crimes that they were pulling off in the past. And then the part that they haven’t aged and that they feel that really no time has passed for them and they have the same venom and the same urgency in the cases they’re fighting pardon me in the same crimes that they’re perpetrating as they did in the past before they disappeared, presents our team with a unique challenge and makes them think differently than other cops do because these guys are ghosts. They have no credit card records. They barely know what a credit card is. They don’t have friends and family members they can go visit. They don’t have a girlfriend or children around. So it’s a unique crime show in that our team has to think completely outside of the box.".

Abrams says, "Jorge was the first person cast in “Lost,” he was the first person that was cast in Alcatraz. When I met Jorge, the weird thing is this friend of his who he was with was obsessed with Alcatraz and was talking a lot about Alcatraz, and we were developing this show. And it was the weirdest thing because I was going to talk to him about it, and she was going on about Alcatraz, and I said, “That’s cool because we’re actually working on a show. Jorge, would you want to be in this show Alcatraz?” And he’s like, “That’s cool.”

Jorge shared his experience with the now shuttered prison: "Yeah, we shot part of the pilot on Alcatraz, and not only did I take the tour, I’ve even recorded a tour for the thing in character...they have stories. They’ll tell you like about the really creepy guys.

Going through Alcatraz and getting to kind of sneak through places, it’s really it was kind of cool. Alcatraz kind of feels like an old skeleton, you know. There’s parts that are kind of crumbly, and it’s like there’s a lot of open space. And it’s just so it has that kind of creepiness that an old skeleton has, all over Alcatraz."

Garcia continued, "It’s like a sense of culture shock, I feel, where when you read about historic criminals, there’s a certain romanticism that you put on them, but then when they’re in front of you, these are scary, scary, scary human beings, and it’s kind of a wake up call for him when he volunteers with enthusiasm and then finds out this is a lot harder than he thought it was going to be."