I’m a huge fan of the 1967 TV showThe Prisoner, created, mostly written by, and starring Patrick McGoohan. In fact, The Prisoner remains the one and only fanfic I ever wrote, a novella penned in 1991 called Return of the King and no you cannot see it (although I was pretty proud of it at the time – and, to be honest, I posted it to alt.fan.prisoner back in The Day so you can probably locate it on teh Googler, though I used a pen name). Ah, the vagaries of youth!
Anyway: I was interested in the reboot/re-imagining/whatever on AMC, so I tuned in to the first episode. Sadly, I did not finish the first episode. Some folks seem to be enjoying this show, and that’s fine. For me it wasn’t so much that the show is terrible, it’s more that it’s boring as hell – or at least was for the first 30 minutes, and how much longer am I expected to give a show? None much longer, that’s what.
Still, plenty of television shows disappoint or don’t connect. What grates on me about AMC’s The Prisoner is the fact that they changed it so fundamentally and completely from the original I wonder why they didn’t just rebrand it and create a new show. Was it the name-recognition of the original? I dunno; while band geeks like me (and you, probably) are aware of the original and possibly still like using the phrase “Be Seeing You!” in cheerily ironic situations, I don’t think Prisoner-mania has swept the nation in the last 20 years. Probably it was somebody’s pet idea, to update the charming old cold-war concept, and that‘s fine too, but in that case they really should have pulled back a little. There’s almost zero 1967-era Prisoner in 2009-era Prisoner, aside from some cheeky visual and vocal references. They should have called it something else and tagged a “inspired-by” line on it, because aside from the most general description of the show – man wakes up in a mysterious Village after resigning his position, weirdness ensues – it’s completely different. Why bother?
On a possibly-loopy side note, I gave up on the first episode when Six looks up in the sky and sees a faint outline shimmering in what looked very much like the shape of the Twin Towers. I thought to myself, myself, he’s been pegged as from New York City – if this turns out to be everyone who was in the Towers when they fell living in purgatory or something, each numbered as a victim, I will set my own house on fire in rage.
I haven’t watched the rest of the episodes, so I don’t know if I’m anywhere near on that instinctive prediction, but the very thought of it was enough for me to change the channel. I think I watched House Hunters instead. Real Estate porn, activate!