Last night was the private premiere party for J.J. Abrams' new San Francisco-based time-and-space-bending TV show Alcatraz. As far as we can tell, no one other than Entertainment Weekly and the show's principal stars were in attendance at the shindig, which was held—where else?—on the Rock itself. We're kind of bummed nobody invited us along, because we love television and have been saving up a ton of Jurassic Park jokes to tell Sam Neill for, like, years now. Anyway according to EW's party report, Fox and Warner Brothers "pulled out all the stops" for the party, which included making people eat off of prison-issue tin plates at dinner and interviewing the cast in the shower room. Because that seems fun.

On the red carpet (which, from the looks of things, was actually more like an concrete carpet), show director and Lost alum Jack Bender explained the mystique of The Rock with all the wide-eyed energy of a fleece-clad tourist: "If you sit in one of those cells and actually imagine what it would be like to spend the rest of your life there, it’s a real eye-opener." Former paleontologist (in our minds anyway) Sam Neill, who had never actually been to the island because the show shoots mostly in Vancouver, explained the weirdness of Hollywood movie magic thusly: "It just feels completely wild to me. We’ve been living Alcatraz for months so being here in Alcatraz is the wildest thing."

The premise of the show, in case you're behind in your mid-season TV premieres, is that the government lied to us when they closed the island prison in 1963. Some sort of mysterious event occurred and now prisoners that went missing 50 years ago are popping up on the streets of San Francisco. Also, speaking of old things popping up that we haven't seen in awhile: how old and nearly dead does Robert Forster look? Somebody call makeup!

Alcatraz airs Monday, January 16th at 8 p.m. And the premiere is a feature-length two hours long.

Previously: Alcatraz Gets a Teaser Trailer
[EW]