In pictures: The Prisoner at 50 | Hacker News Reader

In pictures: The Prisoner at 50

bbc.com

80 pointscconroy15 comments

As a long time fan of The Prisoner I bought the entire series on blu-ray a few years ago and was astonished at the picture quality -- fully 1080 and 16x9. Turns out the show was filmed in full 35mm cinematic quality. Apparently McGoohan had sufficient clout and ambition to master the show with an eye to making it a work for the ages.

Today it looks better than most films. Thrilling.

Wow, that's good to know! I've had an itch for years to re-watch this, and this may be the final nudge I need.

So many old beloved TV shows just look really bad on a modern TV, and can be hard to get back into. (I never have that problem with old black-and-white movies, for some reason.)

Seeing the blu-ray version in all its glory was all the more of a shock since I still remember the show as I first saw it on our 19" B&W TV set on a local low power UHF station. Every episode took place in a snowstorm. Still they were unforgettable (esp. my favorite episode, "The Girl Who Was Death").

I concur, this was one of those classic series I had planned to see for years and recently bought the blu-ray edition. I wasn't disappointed. Thanks to 35mm it really shines on Blu-ray.

It's remarkable that McGoohan got a free hand with this project. I'm not sure if an actor today would have the freedom to lay out his vision in such a way.

What is an individual?

McGoohan’s series hooked a mass TV audience with its intelligent, clever, thrilling and entertaining scripts. Each episode was an event that left the audience either bewildered and angered, or enthralled and inspired. This was part of McGoohan’s intention, to create debate, have the viewers question their own reality. As McGoohan put it in this interview:

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/we_are_all_prisoners_patr...

And the the book that accompanies that interview "The Prisoner Puzzle" can be found here:

It does come come with interpretations for all of the 17 episodes which some might consider spoilers.

https://www.scribd.com/doc/22260199/The-Prisoner-Puzzle

Good to know. Guess I'll have to buy this and watch the series for the third-or-so time.

McGoohan forbad anyone on the crew to mention television or that they were working on a TV show while on the set. He felt that if people thought that they were working "only for TV" then they may be tempted to compromise on quality.

Highly recommended. This show was brilliant and weird.

People were so obsessed with it, that when the final episode aired, with its, uh, interesting ending, actor/writer/director McCoohan fled the country for a couple weeks.

Yes, the final episode makes little if any sense.

There were huge complaints from viewers. Interesting write-up here:

http://www.rotten.com/library/culture/the_prisoner/

Be seeing you.

Not so: people hate it because it goes meta (to a greater extent than most of the other episodes), because it retreats into allegory and humour and fourth-wall-breaking rather than providing a clever resolution on the spy-fiction level; but everything in it makes sense. McGoohan, evidently, had a Catholic attitude of fundamental pessimism about the human condition. He believed that the root problem with human society was human nature, and he didn't share a Randian belief that autarkic superman individualists were blameless, or a Star Trek utopian-socialist belief that the future would raise up a New Man to sort everything out, or a conviction that everything will be groovy once the Revolution comes. Given that, there's basically no one else that Number 1 could be (notice that Pris. doesn't look very surprised to find out), and no other way the series could end (nothing changes, basically).

Loved the show as a teenager in the UK (a repeat; I'm not old enough to have caught the original broadcast).

There's a great write up of an Apple II computer game of 1980 that was based on the show here:

http://www.filfre.net/2011/11/the-prisoner-part-1/ http://www.filfre.net/2011/11/the-prisoner-part-2/

- which makes a good claim for it being a very effective, early "art game" in that its primitive obtuseness all but forces you to hack into the game's code (in BASIC) in order to beat it - a subterfuge well in keeping with the spirit of the TV show.

Great stuff, and being an American game on a computer which didn't get much take up where I lived, a game that I had absolutely no idea existed until reading those articles.

It's odd. Well into the '90s at least nearly all media coverage of The Prisoner had a sneering tone; the journalist evidently felt the need to make sure you knew he wasn't taking it seriously. The success of Lost may have been the thing which had the most to do with changing that.

TV wasn't taken seriously by most critics as an art form until the 00's, which is related to the massive uptick of quality at that point. The Prisoner works as art, but it doesn't really work as escapist entertainment. Taking The Prisoner seriously means conceding that TV can be an art form, and that instantly devalues the vast majority of content produced up until the 00's.

I've been trying to watch this since my cousins introduced it to me (on bootleg Beta tapes!) in the mid '80s. I have the complete run, I've just never made it past episode 4 or 5.

EDIT: yeah, and if you're like me, don't read anything after the last photo in TFA, if you're still planning on watching it.

I was just watching season two of Manhattan, a fictionalization of the US atom bomb project. The writers looked like they borrowed elements of The Prisoner when the federal police are trying to break a potential spy. (I am only part way through)

Wow! This was my absolutely favorite TV series as a child, but later I've never managed to find out the name of it. Thank you sir, I can finally watch it again.

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