Prison Break is celebrated as one of the most addictive thrillers of the early 2000s, centered on an ingenious premise: a structural engineer (Michael Scofield) intentionally gets incarcerated to break out his wrongly convicted brother (Lincoln Burrows).

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: Widely considered the gold standard of the series. Season 1 is the quintessential prison escape, while Season 2 successfully shifted the tension to a massive manhunt across the country.

Broadcast on TVB Pearl, it achieved the largest audience for a foreign drama in the country's history.

The critically acclaimed drama officially premiered in the United States and Canada on August 29, 2005 . While it was originally conceived as a limited series to fill a gap in the television schedule, its explosive success quickly transformed it into a global phenomenon. Global Launch Timeline

The answer might surprise you — because it wasn’t the United States.