History's Great Escapes: Morgan Freeman shines in 'breakout' History TV18 docu-series

The service Reelgood, which keeps track of every film and TV series available online, had a particularly interesting data set in April 2020, at the height of the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. They were assessing the top 10 most watched films on Netflix at a time when basically all of America (or most countries, really) was at home. There were a couple of Marvel films on the list, plus classics like Goodfellas , sci-fi bonanzas like The Matrix and Inception , even the odd Bollywood crows-pleaser like 3 Idiots . However, the list was topped by The Shawshank Redemption (1994), based on the Stephen King novella of the same name, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as a pair of inmates contemplating a prison break. Basically, when we are at our lowest point, the ultimate prison break story gave us hope.

Which is why it made perfect sense for the History TV18 to hire Morgan Freeman to narrate their new show on some of the most famous prison breaks of all time. Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman is a stylish and accessible docu-series that seldom experiments outside its brief and maintains the entertainment quotient carefully. Freeman’s sonorous voice and twinkle-eyed knowingness are utilised to great effect throughout the series.

The first episode—in retrospect, an obvious choice—is based on Alcatraz, the former federal prison atop the eponymous island, a couple of km off the coast of San Francisco, California. “Alcatraz is the true pioneer of the super-max prison”, the show helpfully informs us at the beginning, and they’re absolutely right. The prison stopped being a prison in 1963 (now it’s a state museum) but by then, the island had done enough to become part of Hollywood folklore, the inspiration for films like Escape from Alcatraz ( Clint Eastwood ) and more recently, The Rock ( Nicolas Cage , Sean Connery ).

Great Escapes tells us the story of the infamous June 1962 Alcatraz escape attempt, which later became the inspiration behind the Clint Eastwood movie. Frank Lee Morris (the character Eastwood played) alongside a pair of brothers, John and Clarence Anglin, devised an elaborate and audacious plan. They made papier-mâché-like human heads inside their prison cells and used them at night to make them look like a sleeping human figures. They then used the vents inside their cells to tunnel all the way up to the roof of the prison, alongside supplies like raincoats and inflatable rafts; the idea was to raft their way off the island and onto a nearby place like Angel Island. Sadly, while remains of their rafts were found later, they never were and it’s said that the three did not survive their swimming ordeal.

Nevertheless, the story is fascinating and Great Escapes does a fantastic job of giving us a wealth of detail around the plot. For example, when the three escapees were drilling their way out of their cells, they used Frank Morris’ concertina (musical instrument very similar to the accordion) to drown out the noise of their digging. But they weren’t done with the concertina — they then used the bellows of the concertina (Indian viewers have probably seen the bellows on a harmonium) to inflate their rafts in a smooth manner.

Stylistically speaking, Great Escapes is quite conventional: we have the usual rotating line-up of ‘talking head’ experts to narrate the plot with strategic insertions by Freeeman, of course. In the first episode, for example, we meet Michael Dyke, a retired US Marshal who had previously also been featured on an NPR documentary on the subject. Dyke’s wryly funny, no-nonsense manner will appeal to most viewers; he really is the most typically American viewpoint on the matter, especially when he says things like “the Marshals never really stop looking for you”, alluding to the fact that technically, Morris and the Anglin brothers are still fugitives on the run (something that won’t change up until 100 years after they were born, according to the rules).

And then, of course, there’s Freeman himself. I can think of very few voices more suited to the style and format of the narrative documentary. His modulation and his feel for the emotional beats of any story are on full display here. Moreover, this is not even the first time that one of his famous roles has been connected to a documentary series he’s narrating. From 2016-19, Freeman narrated The Story of God, a National Geographic docu-series that explored the religious books of various world cultures. Freeman’s role as, well, God, in the Jim Carrey movie Bruce Almighty was the allusion in that case. Here, too, he makes a couple of tongue-in-cheek references to The Shawshank Redemption.

Not that he needed to; Great Escapes is an effortlessly entertaining, kinetic affair that benefits greatly from his presence.

Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman premieres on 22nd September on History TV18. 

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

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