Seeing that AMC was redoing that old ITV chestnut The Prisoner, I could not stifle a groan. We know what “new and improved” means by now; I think AMC ought to concentrate on doing something original, and that they already do well, like Mad Men. The new Prisoner will star Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus, and Ian McKellen, who has played everything else.

For those caught up short, The Prisoner was a one-season 1967 British import TV series, all too short and sweet. The premise—spelled out in an unusually long intro per episode—centered around a spy who abruptly resigned his license to kill. Packing for an apparent holiday, he is gassed, only to wake up in a quaint-ish village, actually a nutter house for National Security cases. Think Guantanamo Bay with cottages and tea service.

The Prisoner—only referred to as No. 6—is taunted and meddled with by an ever-changing barrage of site managers always named “No.2”—the personnel changing as he almost casually—and fatally—sabotages their careers.

Looking on now, it is hard to recall how “controversial” it once was. The Prisoner was full of non-sequiturs, unexplained motives and shady outcomes. As a political allegory, it seemed to be uniquely critical of some British shadow government, though the allegiances of the masters of The Village were never established. “Whose side are you on?” was answered with “That would be telling.”

The Orwellian and Kafkaesque backbones of the series—a society where everyone is only a persecuted number, where contacts are eliminated quietly never to be seen again, where paranoia is as good as daily bread—were discussed and re-discussed in the era. The bumpy and contorted ending, an almost Felliniesque carnivale where the escaping Prisoner—No. 6—appears to discover he may have been No. 1 all along—and drops off some of the characters on a highway and returns inconsequentially to his flat—well, it threw people.

Nowadays, it all seems as harmless as any Man from UNCLE episode. We have since seen stranger, and as for endlessly-evolving red herrings, if you grew up on Twin Peaks or The X-Files, you may have no ken as to what the shouting was about.

What still stands out is the force of Patrick McGoohan’s personality. He combines a sort of creepy-sexy appeal that suggests the love child of James Bond and Hannibal Lecter. As a charismatic actor and the creative source of the series (he wrote most of the scripts under pseudonyms, which only mirrors the layers of identity confusion in the stories), McGoohan seemed to be playing off both his fellow actors and the audience. The obvious and would-be hamstringing themes (“I’m a man not a number!”) are undercut by sly humor and The Prisoner’s seeming awareness that he, at all times, is one step ahead of the other numbers.

The Village could be seen as a kind of purgatory for the Smartest Guy in the Room, an ego Mystery Play where the deus-ex-machina is always one’s own quiet cool. The Prisoner is a monument to British male self-abstraction, the ability to be in an inner landscape while the rest of the world is a shouting match of bumping shoulders. One might argue that few creatures have been evolved to be Operatives better than the average Brit of the era—so it may be that The Spy is an allegory of national character.

I first saw The Prisoner when I was thirteen, and I didn’t really get it. It was hard to follow. It was like Waiting fot Godot as written by Ian Fleming. But I sure liked it a hell of a lot better than Doctor Who.

This forms a facet of a subject I have muddled around earlier about, the idea of British culture as digested by American kids sitting around the Boob Tube. Whether we were zoned out on Five Million years to Earth (Quatermass and the Pit) or The Avengers or Doctor in the House, we were building an appreciation, a false knowledge, of English culture in our heads via television. This might frighten some Britishers, should they take stock of what they were saying about themselves. And the same palliative might be advised globally for consumers of Magnum PI and Seinfeld and Family Feud about the like-so reflected memes of American culture.

If you watch Quatermass and The Prisoner and even The Avengers, you begin to get a creepy sense of the confirmation of Orwell’s suspicions: there is some fundamental authoritarian and human-negating rot at the center of Britain’s Security Culture. And no doubt our own.

I’ve never bought the idea of many that Brit TV is more “cerebral” than American—it just covers for its lower budgets with talk, more or less like British foreign policy. But in that fancy brogue—think McGoohan’s rolling thunder of rrrr’s—there are gems of cultural insight whilst we, as American telelprogrammers, have become so deceitfully adept at covering our own rancid spoor.