The 1960s have been very, very good to AMC, whose
Emmy-winning “Mad Men” transformed it from a cable channel known
exclusively for classic — and sometimes not-so-classic — movies to a player in
the realm of original series.
So it’s easy to see why it was attracted to “The
Prisoner,” the iconic 1967 show that fans are still puzzling over more
than 40 years later.
But the six-part “reimagining” of the original,
which AMC will show over three nights starting Sunday, is bound to strike some
of those fans as merely ironic.
Because there’s nothing quite like a remake to drive home a
point about individualism, is there?
Patrick McGoohan, who created “The Prisoner” and
starred as the trapped “Number Six” for its 17-episode run, died in
January, just days after Trevor Hopkins, an executive producer of the new
miniseries, had assured reporters in Los Angeles that McGoohan “loved the
casting,” which included Jim Caviezel as Six and Ian McKellen as Two, the
man in charge of “The Village” where Six finds himself trapped.
Since McGoohan presumably never saw the finished project,
which only finished filming in South Africa late last year, we’ll never know
what he’d have thought.
In any case, the reputation of his “Prisoner,”
which is currently available for full-screen streaming at amctv.com, remains
safe.
Despite the occasional presence of those scary bouncing
balls, AMC’s version is a very different piece of work, with a different story
and a different message.
The original, a child of both the Cold War and a post-World
War II Britain where the safety net was nearly solid, masqueraded as a spy
drama but featured villains ultimately less concerned with uncovering Six’s
secrets than with tamping down his will.
AMC’s remake, which was written by Bill Gallagher, is
decidedly post-9/11, despite the occasional appearance of some familiar-looking
twin towers shimmering in the distance.
There’s considerably less emphasis on Six’s objections to
being referred to as a number — and given the multiplication of PIN numbers and
passwords in most of our lives, a single digit, or even a string of them, has
its appeal — and more on the price we pay for what we tend to regard as our
freedom to behave badly.
Like ABC’s “V,” which is considerably slicker than
its ’80s predecessor, the new “Prisoner” looks marvelous, even if its
desert-like location is initially a lot less appealing to the eye than the
original Village, filmed on the lush grounds of a hotel in Wales.
But also like “V” (so far), it doesn’t seem to
have as much to say. Though in many ways more coherent than the original, whose
finale now strikes me as part music video, part acid trip, it turns out to be
little more than a grim fairy tale, its ultimate message a bit muddled, but not
in a way that makes me want to spend the next few decades trying to figure it
out.
Still, with all due respect to the many actors who played
Two opposite McGoohan’s Six — the position was seemingly recast each time the
character failed to get Six to assimilate — I’m happy to have seen McKellen go
the distance in the role.
His Two, a menace with a nearly perpetual twinkle in his
eye, is the best reason I can think of not to try to escape “The
Prisoner.”
The Prisoner
8 p.m. EST Sunday, Monday and Tuesday
AMC
Ellen Gray writes for the Philadelphia Daily News. Via
McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
