Alcatraz premiered on the FOX network on January 2012, as a midseason replacement. It contained 13 episodes and these were all aired. Fox cancelled Alcatraz on May 9th, 2012. Fox has a long line of SCI-FI cancellation, among them this one. A good cast, great potential but unfortunately as always, the ratings dropped over half of it's audience since the pilot. From 10 million to just under 5 million viewers each week.

In June 2011 was one of eight honorees in the Most Exciting New Series category at the 1st Critics' Choice Television Awards, elected by journalists who had seen the pilots. It had generally favorable reviews on Metacritic, also on Rotten Tomatoes  it has a 60% on the average Tomatometer, but the audience isn't quite so positive, only 38%.

I was pleasantly surprised by this show, I think it really had potential, loved the grumpy Sam Neill as Emerson hauser. I liked the jumps between the present and the past, you learned more and more about Hauser. I found the warden's agenda of the prison really interesting. It had a lot of potential but unfortunately we will never know if the potential would be reached.

Plot (IMDb): Switching between eras, Alcatraz focuses on the Alcatraz prison, which was shut down in 1963 due to unsafe conditions for its prisoners and guards. The show's premise is that both the prisoners and the guards disappeared in 1963 and have abruptly reappeared in modern-day San Francisco, where they are being tracked down by a government agency.

Emerson Hauser

Warden Edwin James