Repeat Offender? Fox's 'Prison Break' Spinoff Sounds Awfully Like 1987's 'Women in Prison'

The creators of "Prison Break," looking for a way to extend their franchise in much the same way as Dick Wolf did with "Law & Order" and the brain trust behind "CSI" did with that series, have sold Fox on the idea of a spinoff.

"Prison Break: Hot Chicks in Cages."

Actually, it's called "Prison Break: Cherry Hill." Personally, I don't care if Cherry Hill is the name of some Massachusetts prison that once had a reputation, as described by Time magazine, for being "the oldest, most disreputable prison in the U.S. . . . damned for 80 years as a verminous pesthole, unfit for human habitation." That's still a totally sissy name for a drama series and sounds more like a "Cashmere Mafia" spinoff.

Anyway, back to the potential new series:

Fox has ordered a script, which will spin around a new character named Molly, who will be introduced on the mother ship later this season.

Molly is an upper-middle-class wife who lands in the slammer after being set up. What with her being upper-middle-class and all, she is somewhat unprepared to fit in at the prison.

Wait a minute! This sounds familiar . . .

(Digs through old TV Columns.)

Yes, here it is: "Women in Prison." Pretty young upper-middle-class princess lands in slammer on trumped-up shoplifting charge and has to deal with rogues' gallery of tough tootsies. Hilarity ensues. Premiered: Oct. 11, 1987. Last aired: April 2, 1988. Network: Fox.

Given how short-lived that series was -- because, of course, the suits running Fox at that time stupidly thought they had a comedy on their hands instead of a drama -- there's undoubtedly a pile of unproduced scripts in the Fox vaults, rich with toilet-cleaning incidents, lesbian asides and prison brutality story lines featuring women in T-shirts wrestling on the floor while guards turn the hose on them in an effort to break things up.

This time, however, the star, Molly, will have suffered family tragedy at the hands of the government conspiracy -- the very same government conspiracy that framed Michael (Wentworth Miller) and Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) and landed them in the hoosegow on "Prison Break," the trade paper the Hollywood Reporter, um, reported.

"Prison Break: Hot Chicks in Cages" -- or "Prison Break: Cherry Hill," if you insist -- will have the same tone as "Prison Break," THR concluded after interviewing series creator Matt Olmstead, among others.