I’ve finally had the chance to view The Prisoner on my DVR last night.  The six-hour miniseries was an update of the original 1960s television series by Patrick MacGoohan.  The original was a product of its time:  paranoid, overly dramatic (Pat…the microphone’s two feet above you, man!), and psychedelic, as you might expect for the time it was made.  Canceled after 17 episodes, the series ended with a WTF episode that’s been analyzed by fans since.

The original series revolved around a spy quitting the service for reasons never disclosed.  He is drugged and wakes up in a fairy-tale village in an unknown location and the rest of the series revolves around the attempts to find out why he resigned his job.  It’s a spy series, mashed up with science-fiction.

AMC decided to take a crack at bringing The Prisoner into the modern day.  The Welsh seaside resort of Portmeirion that had been the set piece for the original is replaced with a very stylish locale in the desert.  This is the high point in the series — it is absolutely beautiful.  The desert is shot lovingly, and the Village feels like a real place, not a set piece, as Portmeirion did.  It should…in many ways, the Village is a character itself, much as Enterprise in Star Trek, or Babylon 5 was in the eponymous series.

The cast is solid:  Ian MacKellen takes over the role of 2 — the manager/dictator of the Village.  He is easily the strongest part of this new production.  He brings menace, partly due to the character realizing that his methods are wrong, but necessary for the common good.  The lead character, 6, is played by Jim Caviezel who is not bad in the role, but brings a much more bland flavor to the role.  He just doesn’t feel important enough to warrant the amount of time 2 puts into breaking him.  This is partly the fault of the writing — 6 in this is not a master spy, he’s an analyst with a skill for pattern recognition who realizes that his company is involved in some shady dealings.

The rest of the main players are Ruth Wilson, who is quite good and possibly, after 2, the most engaging character.  Lenny James from Snatch and Jericho is a cab driver and friend of 6 in the series, and why no one has thought to make this guy a lead in something is beyond me.

The main storyline is not bad.  The Village is more of a consensual hallucination of the people there.  Their conscious minds are going about their business in the real world, but their quasi-conscious minds are trapped in the Village.  The purpose of this is not the repository for spies and other persons of interest that it was in the original series; the Village is a sort of experimental therapy for “damaged people.”  Good idea, poor execution.

The first night was, for me, interesting enough to keep me watching.  the cinematography was pretty, and the differences between the original and the miniseries kept me involved enough to keep watching.  The second episode almost undid all of that.  The last half hour, particularly, was edited badly, with a lot of “classy” cuts back and forth to give the sequence a more “trippy” feeling.  Instead, you find yourself wondering what the hell is going on.  The final night moves quickly to wrap up the story, and some of the ideas present would have been great, had the writing and pacing been better.  This was the main issue with The Prisoner — it’s slooooow.  The pacing is not quite soporific, but unless you had a real interest in seeing a new take on the old show, it’s probably not worth your time.

Style: 4 out of 5, Substance: 2.5 out of 5.