The Prisoner's Dilemmas

The new miniseries The Prisoner scuttles the original’s Cold War politics for post-9/11 paranoia. Sir Ian McKellen, Jim Caviezel, and screenwriter Bill Gallagher discuss the remake.

While the British television show The Prisoner ran only for 17 episodes, more than 40 years ago, its effects have been far-reaching. The spy series’ iconic imagery, surreal plot, and heightened sense of fear and paranoia has influenced such shows as Lost and Battlestar Galactica, and was parodied on The Simpsons. Now AMC has remade The Prisoner for a contemporary audience that might not be familiar with the groundbreaking series.

The original Prisoner—which aired in the U.K. in the 1967-68 season, and in the United States on CBS in 1968—revolved around a spy (played by co-creator Patrick McGoohan) who resigns from the intelligence services and finds himself the titular prisoner in The Village, an impenetrable locale from which he would repeatedly attempt to escape and whose inhabitants are given numbers instead of names. While on its surface an action-thriller, The Prisoner, with its dreamlike narrative, was a deeply existential metaphor for the suspicion and fear of Cold War politics in the 1960s. Some of its best-known lines—“Be seeing you,” “I am not a number, I am a free man!,” —quickly became household phrases, even as the ominous and foreboding show moved into increasingly complex territory. It ended abruptly on an extremely ambiguous note.

Watch an Exclusive Clip from The Prisoner

AMC, which has built its reputation by airing thought-provoking dramas like Mad Men and Breaking Bad, will launch a six-hour miniseries version of The Prisoner, beginning Sunday evening and continuing through Tuesday. Written by Bill Gallagher (BBC’s Conviction) and directed by Nick Hurran (BBC’s Bonekickers), the remake follows a similar setup as the original. The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel plays Number Six, a man who finds himself—after resigning from his job at a shadowy and secretive corporation—locking swords and wits with Lord of the Rings star Sir Ian McKellen’s despotic Number Two in a place known only as… The Village.

The similarities between AMC’s Prisoner and the original end there, and Gallagher was keen to make sure this Prisoner ended with a resolution that was lacking from the original, even as he paid homage to his miniseries’ inspiration. “My approach to it is not to repeat what The Prisoner has done but to respond to it,” said Gallagher. “I wanted to reflect on our times and the past 30 years and how we could approach that through the prism of this mad thing called The Prisoner.”

“Here we are 40 years on and we are living in a land where people accept without question being fingerprinted, having their eyes registered at airports, taking off their clothes at the airport, opening up their luggage, not being allowed to do this, not being allowed to do that, photographed in the streets by cameras that are put up by you’re never quite sure who,” said Sir Ian McKellen, who plays the despotic Number Two.

While this Prisoner stands on its own, Gallagher didn’t want to pretend that the first one didn’t exist. “What I wanted to do was… just drop in playful, sometimes meaningful references to the original,” said Gallagher.

Those references include visual callbacks to some of the most iconic images from the original series, including the penny-farthing bicycle and the rigid uniforms of the original series. And, yes, the menacing floating orb that terrorizes and sometimes suffocates the imprisoned villagers, Rover, makes several appearances as well.

As far as its political metaphors go, the new Prisoner layers in themes for a post-9/11 society that’s constructed around fear and paranoia and as well as a lemming-like mentality.