The great 60's cult TV series The Prisoner has been "re-invented" for the new century. The original British series, from 1967, ran for 17 episodes and was notorious for its surreal tone, ambiguous situations, and lack of concrete closure (though many opinions about the show's meaning and ending are floating around out there in the Internet ether). Patrick McGoohan (pictured below) played a spy who left his agency, was gassed in his apartment, and woke up in an isolated place called simply the Village. Instead of a name he had a number (Number 6); his nemesis was the nominal leader of the Village (Number 2), usually played by a different actor in each episode; #6 would keep trying to escape the Village but no matter how far he got--and in one episode he seemed to get as far as London--he would always wind up back in the Village.
The new version, airing on AMC, is much less ambitious than the original: it's a 6-episode mini-series being presented over 3 nights, which kind of makes it feel like they don't really hold out much hope for a positive reception in the long run and are burning it off as a sweeps event. I've only seen the first 2 shows, but they don't seem terribly promising. Anyone who has seen the original will be making comparisons; unfair, perhaps, but inevitable. The bad news is that this show suffers in that realm. Jim Caviezel cuts a handsome sturdy figure as 6 (they don't use the word "number" in addressing each other), but he lacks McGoohan's charisma, or anti-charisma--in the show, he came across as rather cold, but you could tell there was lots of stuff boiling underneath. Ian McKellan, who has become almost as legendary a figure as Olivier or Gielgud, is the mysterious 2, though here he's been given almost too much background (a sick wife, a teenage son who seems to be being groomed to take over in his dad's footsteps). I like McKellan a lot--he made The Lord of the Rings worth sitting through--but so far, he hasn't had much to do, and what he's done has been forgettable.
The atmosphere is strange but not as surreal as in the original--in the 60's the setting was a seaside village with a bunch of quaint but strange looking small houses; here, it's in the middle of a desert with ordinary-looking A-frame houses and huge glimmering towers at the edge of the dunes. Caviezel is not a former spy, but an employee of some kind of multinational corporation. The character can remember some things from his past (most of the villagers have memory loss problems, having only rudimentary dream-like images of an outside world surfacing in dreams), and seems to be slowly regaining more memories as the show goes on. The supporting cast so far has been unremarkable except for Lennie James (the mysterious outsider in Jericho, pictured) as a friendly cab driver. Apparently the new series will end with all mysteries explained, something antithetical to the letter and spirit of the original. I'll keep watching for the heck of it, but I'm not feeling especially drawn into this.
The great 60's cult TV series The Prisoner has been "re-invented" for the new century. The original British series, from 1967, ran for 17 episodes and was notorious for its surreal tone, ambiguous situations, and lack of concrete closure (though many opinions about the show's meaning and ending are floating around out there in the Internet ether). Patrick McGoohan (pictured below) played a spy who left his agency, was gassed in his apartment, and woke up in an isolated place called simply the Village. Instead of a name he had a number (Number 6); his nemesis was the nominal leader of the Village (Number 2), usually played by a different actor in each episode; #6 would keep trying to escape the Village but no matter how far he got--and in one episode he seemed to get as far as London--he would always wind up back in the Village.
The new version, airing on AMC, is much less ambitious than the original: it's a 6-episode mini-series being presented over 3 nights, which kind of makes it feel like they don't really hold out much hope for a positive reception in the long run and are burning it off as a sweeps event. I've only seen the first 2 shows, but they don't seem terribly promising. Anyone who has seen the original will be making comparisons; unfair, perhaps, but inevitable. The bad news is that this show suffers in that realm. Jim Caviezel cuts a handsome sturdy figure as 6 (they don't use the word "number" in addressing each other), but he lacks McGoohan's charisma, or anti-charisma--in the show, he came across as rather cold, but you could tell there was lots of stuff boiling underneath. Ian McKellan, who has become almost as legendary a figure as Olivier or Gielgud, is the mysterious 2, though here he's been given almost too much background (a sick wife, a teenage son who seems to be being groomed to take over in his dad's footsteps). I like McKellan a lot--he made The Lord of the Rings worth sitting through--but so far, he hasn't had much to do, and what he's done has been forgettable.
The atmosphere is strange but not as surreal as in the original--in the 60's the setting was a seaside village with a bunch of quaint but strange looking small houses; here, it's in the middle of a desert with ordinary-looking A-frame houses and huge glimmering towers at the edge of the dunes. Caviezel is not a former spy, but an employee of some kind of multinational corporation. The character can remember some things from his past (most of the villagers have memory loss problems, having only rudimentary dream-like images of an outside world surfacing in dreams), and seems to be slowly regaining more memories as the show goes on. The supporting cast so far has been unremarkable except for Lennie James (the mysterious outsider in Jericho, pictured) as a friendly cab driver. Apparently the new series will end with all mysteries explained, something antithetical to the letter and spirit of the original. I'll keep watching for the heck of it, but I'm not feeling especially drawn into this.
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