The Prisonerwas the best show of 1967.
Watch it now, today, a half-century after it debuted.
(It’s onAmazon, but the Blu-ray’s so worth it.)
Credit: Everett Collection
And ask yourself: Is it the best show of 2017?
He can’t trust anyone, can’t trust reality.
He knows he is fighting something nefarious, a force of evil.
The man is Patrick McGoohan, born in Queens, raised in Ireland before a childhood move to England.
So he is as congenial as any New Yorker, guilt-ridden as any Irishman, uptight as any Englishman.
He’s playing a character whose name we never learn.
We call him “Number Six,” but so do his oppressors.
Number Six is some kind of spy who angrily retires from his agency.
That happens in the opening credits sequence.
McGoohan himself was under consideration for Bond inDr.
No, had played a spy through the 60s on television as Special Agent John Drake onDanger Man.
McGoohan hated guns and was demanded that Drake would seduce no one.
Watching the first episode ofThe Prisonertoday is a bit of a shock.
You have to adjust a bit, the bright ’60s colors, the uniquely British tone-combo of insidious pleasantries.
They want information from him, and they will get it.
This is restated every week, in the opening credits:
We want information…information…information.
Circa 1967, that line vibed as “secrets,” the kind of thing spies fight over.
And so every episode ofThe Prisonerfollows that essential loop, the attempt tobreakMcGoohan.
There are mind games and mind controls.
Wonderfully, the weekly villain isn’t even the person in charge.
“Who is Number One?”
Sometimes McGoohan will meet a Soviet spy, also held captive.
So watch it today, and see whatdoesn’tresonate.
Most political stories put blame somewhere, butThe Prisoneris maddened and amused and angry at everyone.
The system is corrupt, the people are corrupt, the outsider is corrupt.
Heavy stuff, and important to mention here thatThe Prisoneris droll and endlessly inventive.
My favorite episode, “Many Happy Returns,” opens with a lengthy sequence that is completely dialogue-free.
There’s an episode with two McGoohans and an episode with no McGoohans.
McGoohan is playing a hero, I think, and you root for him throughout.
(A lapsed Catholic can worship a devoted one.)
McGoohan is McGoohan, and all else could be an illusion, and who is McGoohan, anyhow?
There are 17 episodes.
They are weird, wild, druggy, trippy, clever, sorrowful, goofy, gorgeous.
Through it all there is McGoohan, who somehow becomes less knowable as the series progresses.
It’s one of the great indulgent acts of TV authorship, and it is strikingly oblique.
But when you watchThe Prisoner, you realize that the real mystery is the man in the title.
Who is Number Six?
We want to find out.Wewant information.
