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Alcatraz: fun while it lasted?  Three reasons to celebrate the
sorta-local Fox show while it's still on the air.  Clint
Eastwood did it in a 1979 film; MythBusters deemed it
logistically possible in 2003; and now, Lost creator J.J. Abrams
is giving the concept a supernatural spin. In his new show,
Alcatraz, all of the inmates, who vanished in 1963 when the
prison closed, suddenly begin reappearing in 2012, without
having aged or been in any way rehabilitated. So far, that has
made for the periodically cheesy adventures of a cute detective
(Sarah Jones) and her historian–comics geek sidekick (Jorge
Garcia), along with a few scenery-chewing villains and Robert
Forster as a fleeting father figure—all of them supervised by
Sam Neill as some vaguely sinister Fed. But it has also made for
slumping ratings and lukewarm (or worse) reviews, so we figure
it’ll be off the air in no time. And that’s too bad. Below,
three reasons we’d just as soon stay on th