When "Prison Break" arrives tonight, it will get the TV season off to a quick, kinetic start.

Officially, that season is weeks away. Fox, however, starts early and then pauses for baseball. "Prison Break" airs its two-hour premiere at 7 p.m., before moving into its regular slot, Mondays at 8, starting next week.

On one level this show seems like fantasy: Michael (Wentworth Miller), a rich and smart engineer, gets himself deliberately jailed on bank robbery charges so he can spring his brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), from prison. Michael is convinced Lincoln is innocent. Armed with the prison's blueprints, he's planning an elaborate escape and hoping to prove his brother's innocence.

On another level, the opener looks real and that's largely because it was shot on location. Directed by Brett Ratner ("Rush Hour"), the pilot was filmed inside Joliet Prison, which Illinois used until 2002, when it built another prison across the street.

"It's a very depressing, dark place," Purcell says. "And the walls are just stained with sadness."

Miller agrees. "You've got 150 years of fear and violence and pain soaked into those walls," he adds.

There is a universal feeling to such places, says Stacy Keach, who plays the prison's warden. "He's not just a traditional, cliche-ridden (tough) warden," he says. "He's a sensitive guy; he believes in rehabilitation."

Keach has also seen the other side. In 1984, he was arrested for cocaine possession and sentenced to nine months in a British jail.

It was, he says, a gloomier place than Joliet. "They had steel doors rather than open bars, a slit in the window as opposed to the ability to see what's going on outside.

"There were no toilets in the cells. There were just buckets. And you were greeted in the morning with the words, 'Slop out.' "

It was a bitter place but also a place for reflection. "It allows you to recognize what your priorities are in life," says Keach. "Every day is a life-and-death situation."

Purcell's scenes were shot in a cell that once held serial killer John Wayne Gacy. "This makeup lady refused to go in the building because it was where Wayne Gacy used to hang out," he said.

For the pilot, the entire prison became a film studio. For the series, cells were built in a Chicago studio but exteriors will be shot at Joliet. Eventually — no one is saying when — that won't be needed. There will be a prison break and the story will change.

"There is a larger canvas here," says "Prison Break" creator Paul Scheuring. "We're going to break quite a number of people out and scatter them ... there are going to be some people on this escape that should not be on this escape and we want them to fail."

Purcell has played confused guys before. The Australian native starred in Fox's "John Doe," about a man with amnesia about his past.

And Miller starred in the fantasy adventure series "Dinotopia," and shared the role of the main character in "The Human Stain" with Anthony Hopkins.

He is, however, tattoo-free. His character's entire torso is marked.

"The (fake) tattoo takes about four to five hours to apply," Miller says, "if you've got two people working on it."