Short post today, simply to rave about The Prisoner - the 1967 TV show created by Patrick McGoohan, who wrote, starred, and directed. Luckily for all of us, the show is available for free and in HD on Youtube.
I’m of an age that I saw The Simpsons episode that parodied The Prisoner, titled “The Computer Wore Menace Shoes,” long before I ever learned of the show. At the time, I faintly and intuitively understood that the Simpsons was riffing off of some cultural milestone but I had no idea what. Sadly I never looked into it and only discovered the Prisoner recently while researching the history of TV sci-fi.
How to describe this thing? It’s on the metaphoric and surreal level of The Twilight Zone, yet serialized, and also cheeky, sly, extraordinarily British, with a psychedelic 60s aesthetic shot in glorious 35mm. The pilot is… a perfect episode of television and packed with suspense, wit, and sheer momentum. To be honest, I never knew much about McGoohan beyond his terrifying performance as Edward the Longshanks in Braveheart. He’s like some sort of TV-ied Charles Laughton, a brilliant actor with a perfect one-off writer/director turn as the creator of this show. I look forward to completing the full run of the show and reporting back.
I’ll end with a simple, provocative quote from the first episode - something posted on the wall of the paradoxical Village’s bureaucratic headquarters: “Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison to oneself.”
