Ian McKellen had already read the script of a new version of the late-1960s cult television series The Prisoner when he met the author, Bill Gallagher, last year at a London restaurant to discuss the project. As Gallagher recalls their first encounter, McKellen hugged him, then gently patted him on the head and asked, "What goes on in that mind of yours, Bill?"
Don't be surprised if television viewers have a similar reaction when the resulting six-part miniseries, The Prisoner, begins Sunday on AMC. The new production offers a thoroughly revamped take on one of the most enduring television artifacts of the counterculture era.
"The challenge of doing this show was to pay homage and yet be different," Gallagher said. He added that, as a 12-year-old, "I remember being mesmerized and beguiled by the mystery and menace of The Prisoner, disturbed in ways that I couldn't explain then."
The original version of The Prisoner, first broadcast in Britain in 1967 and in the United States in 1968, was a mixture of science fiction, psychological drama and Cold War thriller, with Patrick McGoohan in the title role. McGoohan played a British spy who resigns in disgust from undercover service, is kidnapped by his own handlers and held at a peculiar seaside resort called the Village, from which he constantly tries to escape. In the Village, McGoohan's character is stripped of his name and forced to take a new identity, that of No. 6.
Much has been changed. No. 6 speaks with an American, not British, accent. He works not for a government intelligence service, but a giant corporation called Summakor.
The biggest alterations, however, have to do with No. 2, the all-seeing boss of the Village who from the start is No. 6's main adversary. In the original series, No. 2, played by different actors from one episode to the next, was clearly a villain, the embodiment of nameless bureaucratic evil. In the new version he has a wife, a troubled teenage son, a complicated interior life and probably as many lines as No. 6.
Jim Caviezel was cast as No. 6. He said he liked Gallagher's contemporary spin, especially the tension between the desire "to live in this safe, secure environment" and the resulting sacrifice of personal freedoms.
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