If you happen to enjoy ridiculous television shows that can pointlessly tread water for three entire seasons, we have some bad news.

Prison Break is no more. Fox Entertainment President Kevin Reilly has decided that Prison Break‘s fourth season will be its last. This will no doubt come as a shock to the solitary homeless man who didn’t think that Prison Break got cancelled in 2006 anyway.

So Prison Break may be dying, but let’s focus on all the positive things it gave us – like Wentworth Miller and that hour a week where nothing good was on TV so we could read books instead.

The problem with most big American dramas these days is that they don’t know how to stretch out for multiple seasons. Lost got around this by becoming so impossibly dense that you can’t follow episodes without the aid of a flipchart and an encyclopedia. 24 just repeats itself exactly every year with only minor changes, like the introduction of a female president who’s got a face that looks like a cake. And Heroes is determined to deliberately lose all of its viewers by progressively getting worse and worse with every passing minute.

And then there’s Prison Break – a show about a man breaking out of prison with the aid of his magical tattoo. Which was all well and good, except that at the end of the first season he broke out of prison, leaving nowhere for the show to go.

That’s why the following three seasons of Prison Break – where tattoo man goes on the lam, gets caught, goes to another prison, breaks out of that prison too and goes on the lam again, all because the president is evil or something – were such hopeless failures. You want examples of how bad the latter seasons of Prison Break were? OK, here’s three:

1) In America, the audience halved between the first season and the fourth season.

2) The Prison Break cast got so bored by the ridiculous plotlines that they actually took to killing boys in drunken accidents to pass the time.

3) In the UK, not even Channel Five thought that seasons three and four of Prison Break were good enough to broadcast. And this is Channel Five – the channel that, in a few hours, is genuinely going to broadcast a documentary about a clever pig.

And these reasons are why Kevin Reilly from Fox has decided to put Prison Break out of its misery. The LA Times reports:

The action series starring Wentworth Miller will return on April 17 for its final run of four to six episodes. The show premiered in 2005 as a hit but has progressively run out of steam. “Creatively, the show’s just played out,” Reilly said. “Creatively, everyone feels enough stories were told. We want to finish strong.”

“Well, alright, maybe not strong,” we then imagine Kevin Reilly went on to say “But mediocre. No, no, mediocre’s not the word either. Alone and ignored. That’s the one! We want to finish alone and ignored!”

But now pilot season is coming up, so let’s just hope that Fox learns from the demise of Prison Break and stops commissioning shows that can’t possibly stretch beyond their quickly-completed premise. Apparently Fox is especially keen on the new high-concept drama Man Jumps Off Log, about a man who wants to jump off a log. He does actually jump off the log within the first six seconds of the first episode, but we’re sure they’ll find away to stretch it out for years after that.

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While it's often claimed that celebrities usually get an easy ride when it comes to the law, Lane Garrison is living proof that moderately minor stars of TV shows that used to be good but aren't any more don't get that easy ride.

Lane Garrison – the dead ginger pickpocket from Prison Break – is the guy who drunkenly smashed his car into a tree in December, killing a teenage boy and seriously injuring two others. And yesterday after a series of psychiatric tests, Lane Garrison was sentenced to 40 months in jail for the crime. Let's just hope that Garrison doesn't befriend a heavily-tattooed escape artist while in jail – not because he'd copy the plot of Prison Break and escape, but because he'd copy the plot of Prison Break and get really dull.

A warning – if you're ever in a supermarket and some kids come up to and get all like "hey, you're that dude from TV. Come to our party, then drink, then drive us back to the supermarket to buy more booze," it might be an idea to remember everything Lane Garrison's been through.

Because after that exact situation happened to Lane Garrison he did drunkenly drive three teenagers back to the supermarket to buy more alcohol. Or at least he would have done if only he hadn't crashed his car into a tree on the way – killing a 17-year-old boy and injuring two 15-year-old girls – then lied to police about who was driving and how his drink got spiked. And now he's getting banged up for it.

In March Lane Garrison was charged with manslaughter over the crash. And now, following 90 days of psychiatric evaluation, Lane Garrison has been sentenced to three years and four months in jail, half of the maximum sentence available to the judge. And thanks to the overcrowded Los Angeles prison system, Lane can be expected to be released after just 20 months.

Before sentencing Lane Garrison spoke to the court. E! Online reports:

"I just want to say how sorry I am to the Setian family. I am sickened by my behavior on that night. My thoughts keep coming back to that night. I want to show that my walk with sobriety will be very easy. I want to help other kids not make the same mistake I did."

Lane Garrison's predicament should be a warning to other celebrity drink-drivers like Mel Gibson and Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie that all it takes is just one moment of concentration loss to change the public's perception of you from someone who shouts the word Sugartits at police officers to a killer. 

That's something Lane Garrison will have to live with from now on, though to be fair 'killer' and 'semi-anonymous ginger pickpocket from that show you used to watch before it got crap' probably already have roughly the same social standing.

Read more:

No Prison Break For Lane Garrison – E! Online