A First Look at AMC’s “The Prisoner”

AMC put up a long (over 9 minutes long) preview of their take on the classic 60’s series. Looks awesome. Of course Sir Ian could make a detergent commercial into an Oscar-winning film.

The miniseries debuts this November and stars Jim Caviezel as “Number Six” and Sir Ian McKellen as “Number Two.”

Looks like AMC has made the original series available online.  Be seeing you.

8 replies on “A First Look at AMC’s “The Prisoner””

  1. Well, I wasn’t expecting that. That’s pretty damn cool. The original series lost me about 5 episodes in. I finished it out of pure geekdom, but really the later episodes were crazy LSD trips rehashing the same point over and over again. A mini-series is a much better fit.

    Looking forward to this and V! Looks like ’09 is the year of the remakes for genre shows.

  2. Oh geez. You know, usually when they do a remake I maybe go “Oh geez why” and then maybe watch it, and sometimes it’s good (i.e., BSG, where the original was crap), sometimes it’s completely unnecessary (i.e., the American “Life On Mars” where the original was fantastic), or somewhere in the middle (like the remake of “V”).

    But very, very rarely do I go “Ok, that’s just sacrilege.” And when I say “rarely” I mean “this is the first time.” It is literally painful for me to think about people being introduced to The Prisoner through a remake, no matter how ‘good’ it is, in modern terms. There’s just no way in hell that this new series will have the impact of the original, and I’m willing to bet real money that the last episode DEFINITELY will not.

    • I think you’re being a bit too hard on it. The premise is pretty general and could fit any setting/time in my opinion. I don’t agree that this is taking anything away from the original either, it’s been 30 years; a remake makes sense.

      I’m curious as to the impact the original’s last episode had on you. For me it was confusing, laughable, and just plain random. Going back to London and still seeming to be a prisoner was pretty cool but that was the last 5 mins of the episode?

      • I’m curious as to the impact the original’s last episode had on you.

        Not the original poster, but he’s probably referring to the fact that McGoohan had to go into hiding for about 2 months, such was the outrage that there wasn’t a “simple” ending. Everyone expected a “Bond” villain, and the whole “society isn’t a prison” wasn’t expected, wanted, or appreciated by most.

  3. Caviezel is unconvincing right out of the box and will probably be the downfall of this. He does not have half the screen presence necessary to play against Ian McKellen.

  4. I’m inclined to agree with Jethro, at least a little. This looks like a quality attempt and it has Sir Ian, but The Prisoner was very much of a time and place and Galactica was an exception. The media powers-that-be need to start backing more original creations and previously-unattempted adaptations.

  5. You know, this looks interesting. What I’ve seen of the original was often excellent, but it was also often random to the point of being silly. (Maybe I just haven’t seen enough of it.) This miniseries, judging by the preview, looks like they figured out what makes The Prisoner The Prisoner (or at least one view of that), and built those central ideas up into a new thing. And (again, from the preview) it looks like a tightly focused story in its own right.

    Remakes are a grand tradition in storytelling, going back as long as there have been stories. I don’t have a problem with them as long as they’re good, and they’re creating something new in the process. Naturally, most remakes follow Sturgeon’s Law, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the fact that it’s a remake that makes them unoriginal; it’s the same thing that makes a lot of “original” shows unoriginal. (I think there’s a certain amount of selection in most discussions of remakes, actually. When a remake is terrible, people generalize that remakes are a bad idea. But when something original is terrible people don’t generalize that original works are terrible and everybody should do remakes.)

Comments are closed.