
In pictures: The Prisoner at 50 - cconroy
http://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-37232329
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randcraw
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.

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iainmerrick
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.)

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randcraw
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").

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KingMob
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.

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Animats
Yes, the final episode makes little if any sense.

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leoc
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).

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CmdrKrool
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-1/)
[http://www.filfre.net/2011/11/the-prisoner-
part-2/](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.

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leoc
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.

~~~
philwelch
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.

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phjesusthatguy3
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.

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peter303
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)

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kbart
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.

