Escape at Dannemora

Overlong, but the acting is immense

> You can never have enough security with Richard Matt. You can never trust him. You can never turn your back on him. He is the most vicious, evil person I've ever come across in 38 years as a police officer.

- Cpt. Gabriel DiBernardo, North Tonawanda Police Department (Ret.), speaking the day after Richard Matt and David Sweat had escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility; "A Convicted Murderer's Escape Alarms Investigators From His Past" (Rick Rojas); New York Times (June 7, 2015)

> I don't want nothing to do with him. He has tormented me since he was 9 years old, and now he's 34 and I feel like he's still doing it.

- Pamela Sweat speaking about her son, David; "Convict's mother: 'I couldn't believe he did it'" (Megan Brockett); USA Today (June 23, 2015)

> Ben Stiller is a son-of-a-bitch liar just like the rest of the world. He doesn't care about the truth. All he cares about is making millions off me. He's an idiot.

- Joyce "Tilly" Mitchell voicing her opinion about the Escape at Dannemora director; "Joyce Mitchell rips Ben Stiller over Escape at Dannemora" (Sara Dorn); New York Post (December 22, 2018)

As far back as the late 80s/early 90s, long before long-form narrative would become the dominant mode of television storytelling, I was a fan of what would then have been called "non-episodic storytelling". The best-known examples at that time were Michael Mann's ground-breaking Crime Story (1986-1987), and David Lynch and Mark Frost's Twin Peaks (1990-1991). Crime Story's uniqueness came from a concept that would later be used by Steven Bochco on both Murder One (1995-1996) and Murder in the First (2014-2016), as well as forming the basis for David Simon and Ed Burns's masterful The Wire (2002-2008); over the course of a single season (at the time, 21-24 episodes), one criminal investigation would play out from beginning to end, told from the perspective of both the police and the criminals. In the case of Twin Peaks, the plan was to draw people in with a tantalising murder mystery, before slowly letting that hook fade into the background. Of course, neither show played out as intended, and ironically enough, both floundered in their second seasons because they were forced by the networks to sustain themselves beyond their original conception, with each becoming