Today, March 19, is the birthday of Patrick McGoohan.
It’s a timely opportunity to remember and pay tribute to McGoohan, an iconoclastic talent who excelled as an actor, director, producer, screenwriter and creator of one of the most unusual, provocative, genre-smashing and influential TV series in history.
I’m referring, of course, to The Prisoner, inducted in 2002 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
McGoohan (1928-2009) achieved a great deal on screen in his long and well-respected career. But The Prisoner in retrospect may be his crowning and most lasting achievement.
Yet, when McGoohan conceived, wrote and starred in the short-lived series, no one quite knew how to categorize it or what to make of it.
THE MYSTERIOUS PLEASURES OF THE PRISONER
Filmed in 7 serialized episodes between 1966 and 1968, the emblematic TV series incorporated but also transcended several genres. It’s science fiction, but also a mystery, suspense thriller, spy-surveillance story, psychological drama, absurdist comedy, metaphysical allegory, anti-authoritarian dystopia and Orwellian parable.
Millions of young people in the 1960s, including members of the young libertarian movement and the so-called counterculture (and I straddled both demographic subgroups), wrestled with it and embraced the series as an existential exploration of identity and a romantic affirmation of freedom and individuality.
McGoohan not only conceived and starred in the series as ex-spy Number Six, but also shaped it as one of five writers and four directors.
“In other words, he had his hand in every facet of the series,” Cat Eldridge wrote in a tribute to McGoohan published in File 770, a leading sf/fantasy online publication.
As for the dramatic and dizzying collage that opened each episode and established its mysterious and hallucinogenic framework, “it was, without doubt, one of the best openings I’ve seen,” Eldridge wrote.
“Then there was the series. Weird, thrilling, mysterious. Eminently watchable over and over and over again. Was it SF? Or was it a spy series set in the very near future? Who knew?”
A TV SERIES AHEAD OF ITS ERA
In a decade when mainstream television had to be basic and clear enough – and frankly, usually simple and dull enough – to wrap up everything by the end of each episode to appeal to a common-denominator mass audience, The Prisoner was an intentionally ambiguous anomaly.
Something intelligent enough to challenge audiences – rather than insult them. Something that left you still thinking about it the next day, and the next week. Something that even lingered in your dreams – or nightmares.
By design, its many unanswered questions – about plot, character motivations and the ultimate themes – only reinforced the series’ potent sense of mystery, suspense, adventure and self-aware wit.
WHAT – AND WHERE – IS THE VILLAGE?
And what to make of its surreal world-building?
Set in The Village, a strangely picturesque and cheerful but Kafkaesque community of interrogators and seemingly retired spies but also a prison cut off from the rest of the world, the TV series revolved around a former British spy who resigns from the government but is kidnapped by mysterious forces and becomes a pampered prisoner.
With seemingly no hope of escape, McGoohan’s prisoner nevertheless refuses to bow to authority or tell his interrogators anything that they really want to know about why he resigned as a British spy.
A rebel with a cause – preserving his own independence of mind and spirit – Number Six ranks close to number one among 1960s-1970s icons of rebellion, resistance and individualism.
Like the iconic heroes in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged or the rebellious Randle P. McMurphy in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, McGoohan’s Prisoner took no prisoners in his acts of courage, resistance, heroic individualism and Questioning Authority.
In its unabashed ambiguities, complexities and resonant levels of meaning, The Prisoner paved the way for countless modern TV series (including Twin Peaks, Lost, Westworld, Fringe, Battlestar Galactica, The OA, Riverdale, Russian Doll, Mr. Robot, Outer Range, etc.) that took advantage of the greater complexities and ambiguities that audiences are more willing to accept and explore in the 21st century.
MCGOOHAN’S WIDE RANGE OF FILM/TV ROLES
McGoohan, an excellent actor, also played major roles in the TV series Danger Man (a British spy drama that immediately preceded and partly inspired The Prisoner), Columbo and narrated Journey Into Darkness, a British television horror film anthology.
His films especially reflected his vast range: Disney-themed heroic American history (The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh), comedy (Silver Streak), action-adventure (Ice Station Zebra), historical dramas (Braveheart and Mary, Queen of Scots), romantic drama (The Man in the Iron Mask), sci-fi/horror (Scanners) and animated features (Treasure Planet.)
While several of his films hold up rather well over the decades, McGoohan will be remembered most as a maverick individualist ahead of his time – and for The Prisoner, his most resonant and enduring creation.
FOR FURTHER READING
Check out the Prometheus Blog Appreciation of The Prisoner.
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An excellent show. The final episode was underwhelming and apparently written on the spot but overall a fine series. I believe you meant to write “17” rather than “7” episodes.
I think I may have been led to The Prisoner in the early 1980s by Chris Tame of the UK’s Libertarian Alliance.