TV Series: The Prisoner

I realize that I give the impression that I never watch television. In one strict sense, this is true; in the last few years, about all I’ve seen on TV is a few big sporting events (the World Series, the last game of the World Cup, the college football National Championship, etc.), Ronald Reagan’s funeral, the occasional criminal suspense show like Law & Order, and some of the very early footage of the Iraq Shock and Awe campaign. But I do see a lot of television shows from video, generally via my Netflix account recently, so it’s not because I think there aren’t any shows worth watching. But any kind of regular TV watching seems like a huge waste of time to me; it’s not just the commercials, which are a dead loss of about 18 minutes per hour, but the fact that it’s too easy to just start watching whatever happens to be available (whatever is airing at a given time or whatever your Tivo has recorded for you), whether it’s all that terribly good or not. (I say this as a person sucked into watching that stupid Helen Hunt/Paul Reiser sitcom in syndication way too many times because it came on after the Fox weather update at 10:05 p.m.) And successfully following any show with a narrative arc that extends from episode to episode is really hard to do. Even though I’m quite fond of many of PBS’s productions, it is impossible to watch them; they will take what is obviously a 2 and a half hour movie and break into 3 sections to be shown at seemingly utterly random times over the course of a couple of weeks – 7:00 Tuesday, 8:30 Thursday, 3:00 next Sunday. I have come to assume that one of the requirements for becoming a local PBS station schedule manager is being totally fucking drunk all the time.

In the last 5 years or so, I have seen several TV shows in their entirety on video. Let’s start with the first: The Prisoner.

The very first video Robert and I rented from Netflix was Gone with the Wind, which I had never seen. (Yeah, I know. This glaring oversight has now been corrected so give it a rest.) The second video was Season 1, Disk 1 of The Prisoner, which Robert had seen at least parts of in the past but was completely unfamiliar to me. If you’ve never heard of this show, it’s hard to describe just how bizarre, surreal, fascinating, strangely well-realized, spawning of a thousand associations, and basically brilliant it is. Starring Patrick McGoohan, following up his secret agent role in Danger Man, the 1960s show follows the efforts of the man identified only as Number 6 as he attempts to break out of the Village, a really freaky head trip of a prison, (or understand what the hell is going on or at very least maintain his sanity and his identity as a “free man”), while the authorities there try to break him down, presumably to find out why he resigned his commission with the government as a spy. A battle of the wills ensues, accompanied by a panoply of counter-culture-influenced SF weirdness. Number 6 is interrogated, drugged, hypnotized, made psychotic with technology, forced to wear ridiculous clothing, chased by a surprisingly menacing large white balloon-shaped person-swallower called Rover, and overall just totally played with by the authorities – a series of Number 2s and his/her confederates. The final episode is totally psychedelic, with a rendition of the song “Dem Bones” that still sticks in my head, but it does explain in the end, in my opinion, the deeper meaning of all that has occurred and makes a pretty clear statement about the nature of liberty. (As to whether this statement is a clever insight or sophomoric posturing, rational people may disagree.) Once you’ve seen this show, you’ll see allusions to it all over SF. Watching this show is to watching contemporary SF perhaps not quite as reading the Bible is to reading Faulkner, but you’ll still enjoy the little thrill of recognition every time you hear the words “Be seeing you.” I believe that for those who make it all the way through, the show will have high re-watchability and reward time spent familiarizing oneself with its universe/finding contradictions/debating with fellow-travelers in the middle of the night. Oh, and dressing up as any of the characters would make for a kicking Halloween costume, too. 8/10 stars.