'Prison Break' is no con job

[Brian Damage]

"Prison Break" has made a break of its own, and it has proven that what does not kill you can indeed sometimes make you stronger.

When "Prison Break" launched three years ago, it was a solid action drama with a potentially problematic premise: A guy deliberately goes to prison to break his brother out.

That led to a tense and sometimes overly dense season in which Michael Scofield (Wentworth Miller) put together a ragged coalition of inmates and outside sympathizers to engineer a next-to-impossible escape for himself, his brother Lincoln (Dominic Purcell) and everyone else who survived.

The problem, of course, was that if escaping from prison was the dramatic core of the story, there's only so long you can drag out the attempt. Then, once they do get out, what do you do next?

Fortunately, the creators had a plan. While the guys were trying to break out, we were gradually learning about their real adversaries, The Company.

The Company is one of those shadowy, cold-blooded outfits that lives outside all the rules, invisible or immune to legitimate law enforcement because it has infiltrated the government.

Now that's an opponent who's good for a lot of television. Sure enough, once Michael and Lincoln got out, they and their loved ones suddenly started finding themselves in The Company's murderous path.

As the fourth season begins tonight, Michael is still enraged that The Company killed the woman he loved, Dr. Sara Morgan (Sarah Wayne Callies).

Then Lincoln gets thrown back in a Panamanian jail, so suddenly Michael finds he's not really out of the game at all, but has to make deals just to keep everybody else alive.

This means getting back together with nasty folks like T-Bag (Robert Knepper). It also means making a new friend: Homeland Security agent Don Self, played by Michael Rapaport. Self has some interesting information about Michael and Lincoln's father, but mainly he has an offer, which is, "Trust me and we can bring The Company down."

Since we've seen the things The Company can do, and how little it cares about the people to whom it does all those things, this seems like a tall order.

But that's the stuff on which good action television can be built, and "Prison Break" has ducked, bobbed and weaved its way into a position the casual viewer probably would have bet against it ever reaching.

Now it must find a way to become more than a routine action drama pitting plucky good guys against amoral, robotic bad guys.

It's got the characters who can do that, though, and it's also streamlined its story enough so even a new viewer can figure out what's going on from tonight's back-to-back premiere episodes.

"Prison Break" will never get picked up for reruns on Oxygen, but it could be Spike TV with a bigger brain.

dhinckley@nydailynews.com