JANUARY 19, 2009
A cult classic comes in from the cold
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Bored by his role in Britain’s popular Danger Man series (Secret Agent in the USA), Patrick McGoohan — who died last week at 80 — created The Prisoner. This surreal, subversively comedic example of the paranoid style aired in America in the summer of ’68, and it fit the cultural moment to a T. Now you can watch all 17 episodes again, online, in high-quality streams presented by AMC.
The Prisoner’s elliptical story lines (involving an anonymous spy, held prisoner by anonymous forces, in an anonymous seaside village) laid the groundwork for shows like Lost and The X-Files. Its existential take on the spy genre (think Kafka meets Orwell as scripted by Ian Fleming) was perfectly calibrated to appeal to a generation made numb by political assassinations and wary of political institutions. AMC has a remake in the works — Ian McKellen plays the nefarious Number Two — but the original has retained its charms.
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The Prisoner at AMC’s website
