I accept your points, as plausible and logical. I disagree with the cost of production and estimation of losses.
The cost of production of Prison Break is just taken from Wikipedia. It is not infallible, but that's the numbers I've seen. Prison Break was especially covered in the news for being the most popular TV Series that "no-one" saw on TV.
I saw the first season of Prison Break on TV, but after that they quickly lost their muse. The plot of the first season, the idea that an intelligent person would first
engineer a new prison, arrange to get his brother transfered there, and then get convicted to be sent there, and have his break-out plan encoded onto his skin as a tatoo is pretty cool. But once they were out, it was just like so many other drama shows I've seen before.