Il prigioniero

Who would think that the coolest show of 2004 would have been the rebroadcast of this 1960's British classic?

When I lived in the U.K. I heard about this show a lot, and when I went to Wales was told about the town where it was filmed, but I had no idea why people were so durned excited about it.

It can be murky and deliberately obscure, but I'm not sure I've ever seen a show as creative and bizarre....and you have to love the fact that No. 6 always looks so dammed serious!

Seriously, it's worth watching, if only to remember how important good writing and unique ideas used to be in television!

When I saw the first episode of this series, my jaw dropped in amazement. Here was a TV series that was entertaining and actually made you think. Nothing was ever what it appeared, no one had a real name, you never knew who was the good guy or the bad guy (or if they were one in the same!). The "final" episode was what could only be described as PSYCHEDELIC.

This TV series was, and still is, way ahead of its time.

As a side note, there is a "lost" first episode that is wildly different than the first one generally aired that explains some of the symbolism used in the series.

I hope the movie remake is made and distributed.

Unfortunately, when you see see The Prisoner for the first time at an early age it tends to spoil television for the rest of your life. I was thirteen when I saw it in 1968, and for more than thirty years I keep hoping to find TV shows (and movies and books) that will give me the same rush of seeing vast, unexpected and unexplained vistas for the very first time. Too, too rare. Virtually non-existent. For The Prisoner didn't just present a new 'twist' (rare enough), it was a whole new world, with a wildly different culture, environment and rules, only gradually comprehended, if at all. And yet, strangely, it is more like the "real" world than any other television program, even the news, because The Prisoner doesn't explain itself, it just happens. If YOU want to know what's going on, figure it out for yourself... if you can. You might be right, you might be wrong, but if simplistic explanations are your comfort, you almost certainly WILL be wrong. Just like explorers of old. Just like real life. Though with the increasing homogenization of the world, real life is becoming, alas, more like television.

The best non-comedic TV show I've ever seen, and certainly one of the most unique TV shows of any genre. A terrific blend of Kafka's drama/satire, fantasy, and spy action/thriller. There is also a healthy dose of humour in it, but nothing over-the-top like we have in today's TV shows. Although it consists of 17 episodes, I would consider the first 12 to be the core of the series. After those 12 we have mostly filler episodes, like the dull one in the Wild West, or the one in which McGoohan barely even appears. The last two episodes, the less-than-grand double-episode finale, are a bit too abstract and quite tiresome at times even. From the last 5 episodes I would only name "The Girl Who Was Death" as being quite good.

The best/most fun episodes are "Arrival", "Dance of the Dead", "ABC", "The General", "A Change Of Mind", and "Hammer Into Anvil". From the first 12, I would only single out "Schizoid Man" as being much weaker than the others.

Several things went into making this show so much fun. First of all, the location, the Welsh village. Secondly, having McGoohan in the lead; I cannot possible imagine any other actor playing Number 6 in the excellent, off-the-wall yet controlled manner in which he plays him. McGoohan hits all the right notes; his performance is just as eccentric as it needs to be. (For the uninitiated, he was among the 2 or 3 main candidates to be the first James Bond, but refused the role.) Thirdly, the highly unusual, original scripts. Fourthly, the series was filmed in the mid-60s, and the visual quality of TV shows from that decade is superior to anything that came before or after. And fifthly, the acting from all the others was on a high level.

Montage: a secret agent (Patrick McGoohan) storms into his superior's office and angrily resigns his post, for reasons unknown. A machine files away his Xed-out photo; he speeds away to his home. He enters his house and begins packing for a journey. Outside, a hearse pulls up to the curb. A pallbearer strides to the door. Knockout gas comes pouring in through the keyhole. When our hero awakes the room is the same... but the world outside is not.

We are in the Village, a picturesque nightmare co-fashioned by Orwell, Kafka, and Carroll. The unnamed agent has become Number Six in a population of equally nameless, creepily cheerful residents, headed by a shifting, and shifty, Number Two. Who is Number One? Well, that's the question, isn't it... In one direction are impassable mountains, in the other the sea -- and on patrol is a bizarre, lethal white balloon that hunts down those unwise enough to dare them.

Viewed today, "The Prisoner" seems so strikingly ahead of its time that one can only regard it as either a visionary masterpiece or a dazzling failure. Either way it is compulsive viewing. Co-creators McGoohan and George Markstein were seemingly at odds about what to make of it all, with McGoohan eschewing conventional James Bondisms for a more surreal, allegorical approach. (He himself wrote and directed some of the series' best and most bewildering episodes.) And truly "The Prisoner" works best when at its least explanatory and most hallucinatory. Not until "Twin Peaks" would another television show dabble this heavily in the logic of dreams.

McGoohan also believed the premise would only hold up over a limited run, and his concern seems justified. A few of the later of the seventeen episodes show desperation: low points include the feebly whimsical "The Girl Who Was Death," the plodding "It's Your Funeral," and "The General," which might as well be -- and nearly is -- an episode of Star Trek.

Yet at its best, in episodes like "Arrival," "Free For All," "Dance of Death," "Many Happy Returns," and the finale (one of the most astonishing hours ever programmed for television), the series achieves something extraordinary. Its influence reaches beyond such obvious successors as "Lost" and "The League of Gentlemen" -- and could you imagine "Brazil" or "The Matrix" without it? "The Prisoner" catches at a thread in our subconscious and pulls it loose; it tells us that something is genuinely wrong somewhere with the Great Big Picture. Its true antecedents are Chesterton's "The Man Who Was Thursday" and O'Brien's "The Third Policeman": nonsense that bleeds into spiritual unease.

It's not hard to understand why the series has a cult following, or why, love it or hate it, it still packs a punch. We are in the Village. Be seeing you...