The Prisoner Trapped by Original and AMC's High Expectations

Pressure? What pressure?
Any new show from AMC has an awful lot to live up to. If it’s not another “Mad Men,” only the greatest show ever on TV right now, it could be declared a disappointment. Bryan Cranston, the Emmy winning star of AMC’s other signature series, “Breaking Bad,” sets the bar sky high for actors on the network.
With all of that already stacked against it, AMC has chosen to remake a cult classic, “The Prisoner.” That means the people most interested in tuning in are passionate about the way Patrick McGoohan told the story, no matter how confusing, confounding and incomprehensible that 70s-era series was to most people. No new production is likely to be an improvement as far as true fans are concerned.
AMC’s “The Prisoner” starts Sunday night. Jim Caviezel is the tormented soul who finds himself trapped in The Village in the new production, replacing McGoohan.
McGoohan was a British secret agent who wanted to drop out of the spy game and it was unclear which side in the Cold War had captured him, stripped him of his name and branded him with a number, No. 6.
Caviezel’s back story is that he’s a New Yorker who quit his job working for a corporation that specialized in eavesdropping on the world via closed circuit security cameras. Who would want to know what he knows so desperately as to set up a trap as elaborate as The Village?
Bottom line? Caviezel is no McGoohan. That leaves Ian McKellen as the shows most interesting character. As No. 2, McKellen runs The Village. (In the original, a different actor played No. 2, every week, leaving viewers as off-balance as No. 6.) Having McKellen as such a strong, interesting and enigmatic adversary tosses the series on its ear.
The issues of freedom and privacy are also different than they were in the 70s. In an era of electronic data people now know their every move is being tracked.
“The Prisoner” is still a big confusion bundle of mind games and misdirection. The new production keeps us guessing: What’s real? What’s a hallucination? Is there still a world beyond the village?  And how does that big ball that keeps people from escaping work?
AMC is running this six-hour mini-series over three consecutives days. Sunday’s installment is intriguing enough to make me want to see how it will end—it will have to be less opaque that the impenetrable original.
This morning, reviews of “The Prisoner” were mixed at best.
The New York Times says the AMC’s effort is “unlikely to prove as lasting [as the original], but the new series still manages to be thrilling.” USA Today flat out panned “The Prisoner,” declaring that ‘enigmas are not what they used to be.” And Entertainment Weekly gave the miniseries a “C,” says it is “self-absorbed to the point of incoherence.
Even if it can’t measure up to the 70s “The Prisoner” and doesn’t prove to be as compelling as “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” there’s no question AMC is trying to live up to its mandate of creating original programming that is cinematic in its vision and quality.
So to whatever AMC tries next I’d say “I’ll be seeing you.”