Escape at Dannemora (Stiller, 2018)
As anticipation builds1 for season two of Severance, I want to draw your attention to an earlier piece of Ben Stiller serialised TV, the plucked-from-the-headlines drama Escape at Dannemora from 2018.
I wrote about it for RNZ back in the day:
On June 6, 2015 two lifers from the “Honor Block” of the 170-year-old Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora in upstate New York, successfully completed the tunnelling exercise they had been working on for months and escaped. Richard Matt and David Sweat were bad dudes – both convicted of murder – but Matt was an especially bad egg. They were expecting to be picked up in a getaway car driven by a prison employee, Joyce Mitchell who had worked with both while she supervised the prison tailoring workshop, but she had a case of cold feet and didn’t show up.
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Now, there is an eight-part mini-series – Escape at Dannemora – and it’s one of the best bits of television you’ll see this year. It’s notable for a few reasons – Patricia Arquette won a Golden Globe late last year for a moving and vanity-free portrayal of Mitchell; in his portrayal of Sweat, Paul Dano turned from being an actor I was consistently irritated by to an actor I now find pretty watchable – but I think the most interesting thing going on here is the emergence of comic actor Ben Stiller as a director with real cinematic grunt.
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In a weird, small-world, coincidence, this series is not the first fictionalised version of the escape to make it to the screen. In 2017, Stephen Tolkin wrote and directed New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell for the Lifetime Network. Stephen Tolkin is the brother of Michael Tolkin who co-wrote most of Escape at Dannemora. Christmas dinner must have been interesting in the Tolkin household this year.
You can read the whole review here, and the series is well worth your time.
Where to watch Escape at Dannemora
Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon
Australia, Canada, Ireland & UK: Streaming on Paramount+
India: Not currently available
USA: Streaming on Netflix, Fubo and Paramount+
Further listening
If you get open this email before 4pm on Tuesday, you can tune in to RNZ Concert and listen to me chatting to host Bryan Crump about the music of John Williams. I’ve selected a few tunes, too, and we’ll see how many we can squeeze in.
I’m not too edge-of-my-seat about Severance, to be honest. We enjoyed it enough but the final episode urgent second season scene-setting took me out of the story we had been watching. A common enough problem.
