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Nearly a decade ago, an infamous prison break occurred at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. The unusual thing was that the escape was made possible by a seemingly inconspicuous woman who worked in the prison and who also happened to be having an affair with the two refugees. The film directed by Ben Stiller Escape to Dannemorawhich premiered on Showtime in 2018 but has just landed on Netflix, is a barely fictionalized account of this case. Will such a new case work well as a miniseries?

Opening shot: An eagle flies through a cloudless blue sky as ELP's “From The Beginning” begins to play. We then see a highway running through fields and an SUV driving through.

The essentials: In the SUV is New York Inspector General Catherine Scott (Bonnie Hunt), who is driving to the small town of Dannemora to investigate an outbreak at the Clinton Correction Facility, a maximum security prison. It's June 2015. There she interviews one of those arrested during the escape, a middle-aged woman with glasses named Joyce “Tillie” Mitchell (Patricia Arquette). She is accused of helping the two prisoners escape, and Catherine wants to know what she is willing to admit. The first thing Tillie says is, “Am I going to lose my job?”

We look back on January. Tillie is a prison seamstress and runs a huge shop where inmates sew uniforms and fulfill special requests from the superintendent. Her husband Lyle (Eric Lange) also works there, and they commute there every day in the cold season, talking the kind of chatter that long-time married couples always say: about boring, everyday things.

At work, she calls one of the inmates, David Sweat (Paul Dano), into a side room to get some machine oil or for some other bogus reason; She pulls down her pants and he takes her from behind. They think they are being discreet, but the rumors about them spread through the cell block and even reach Lyle. Sweat likes the special treatment, but Tillie pressures him to turn it into a real relationship, which leads to Sweat asking for a transfer from Clinton.

All this is observed by Richard Matt (Benicio Del Toro), a bon vivant whose strong personality and penchant for threats have put him in a position where he more or less calls the shots with Clinton. New inmates have to ask him for permission to do things, and he becomes upset when the new guy interrupts his conversation with one of the top COs, Gene Palmer (David Morse). Palmer appears to be in Matt's pocket, letting him paint in his cell (he even asks Matt to paint a portrait of his girlfriend), letting Matt know when the guards are looking for contraband, and even letting him enter a supply tunnel leading from his office out of. Palmer tries to be friends with Matt and talks about how “everyone has a personality.” Matt replies menacingly, “Look me in the eyes and tell me you believe that.”

Matt attacks Tillie, telling her, “A friend of Sweat's is a friend of mine,” and she is both annoyed and flattered. Then, after throwing his phone away, Matt notices an air vent he's never seen before and an idea comes to him.

Our opinion: Escape to Dannemora based on an infamous 2015 prison break case; The real Tillie was in the headlines as recently as 2017 when her request to have her sentence reduced was rejected. It was quite a sensational story when it came out; A middle-aged seamstress allows two dangerous men, with whom they both had sexual relations, to escape from a maximum security prison. Normally this would be the subject of a quickly made Lifetime movie. But in the very capable hands of Ben Stiller, the story of Brett Johnson (mad Men) and Michael Tolkin (Profound impact), the story becomes more complex and epic.

We've seen Del Toro play brooding and menacing before; He's fantastic as Matt, but the way he plays it isn't much different from what we've seen. Paul Dano is so good that you can barely tell it's Paul Dano playing Sweat. But Arquette is the real star of Dannemoraeven though Del Toro is first in the credits. At times, she plays Tillie as the chubby, whiny, and not-so-bright person she appears to be at first glance. But in other scenes, she projects a sweaty sexuality that belies her monotonous life with Lyle. In still other cases, her treatment of Lyle and others is cutting to the point of ruthlessness.

What we know about Tillie is that there is an aspect of her life that is not only deeply troubling, but also makes her deeply uneasy. And Arquette shows all of this in the first episode, even if we don't know exactly why she is the way she is.

Stiller does a fantastic job in the first episode; While others might think he's dragging out the story, he's trying to create an atmosphere where we kind of contrast the small town FargoEsque life of Tillie and Lyle with Tillie's gluttony within Clinton's walls. He also does a great job of combining classic rock with current pop to show that this story isn't from 30 years ago, but happened a little over 9 years ago and is still very fresh.

Gender and skin: At least three scenes in which Tillie and Sweat have awkward sex, one in which she demands that he look at her face. However, there is no nudity other than butts.

Parting shot: After the lights go out, Matt asks Sweat if the COs moved his bed during their inspection. Sweat says, “I don’t believe that…why?” Matt: “Nothing.”

Sleeperstar: At first we thought Eric Lange was portraying Lyle as too much of an idiot. But when Lyle asked Tillie why she talks to Sweat so much, we realized he's smarter than his boring dialogue about the 1812 War Museum makes him seem. Oh, and we get to watch Bonnie Hunt do pretty much everything, and she's great here as she tries to squeeze information out of Tillie by pretending to be on her side.

Most Pilot-y Lines: “That’s not crap! It's Nick Jonas and I like it!” This sentence from Tillie gave us goosebumps, but not good ones.

Our call: STREAM IT. Good directing from Stiller and an Emmy-nominated performance from Arquette make it Escape to Dannemora a must.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and technology, but he's not kidding himself: He's a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Fast Company's Co.Create, and elsewhere.

Regard Escape to Dannemora on Showtime