I won't provide any spoilers for The Prisoner 2009 here — we'll save those for tomorrow — but suffice to say, the remake of the paranoid thriller, starring James Caviezel and Ian McKellan, is dreadfully dull. It feels as empty and as dry as the endless deserts that provide its main setting. The "WTF" of the original has been replaced by a listless, unengaging "What the hey."

(To be fair, I haven't yet watched the last two episodes (out of six total). But I'm not getting my hopes up at this point. The first four episodes are so screamingly dull, I'm only still watching out of a sense of duty and masochism.)

To be honest, I went into this remake with severe doubts that The Prisoner could be remade — it's so odd, so quintessentially 1960s, that it's hard to imagine it working for a 2000s audience. The core message, about distrust for the artificial, conformist institutions of a braindead society, feels both too dated and too true for current television to handle. On the other hand — Ian McKellen! A man I would watch read the ingredients off a cat food label!

Sadly, it's worse than I feared. The makers of this new Prisoner apparently realized that they couldn't really recapture the gonzo spirit of the original — so they made radical changes to the basic storyline. And some of these ideas sort of make sense, whether you agree with them — but the most important change to the original is something that makes no sense whatsoever. They really wrecked the most basic element of the show, in a way that feels both baffling and heartbreaking.

As for McKellan, he's definitely the one saving grace. In tonight's two hours, he gets all the best lines and has a few genuinely classic moments. But there are also long stretches of McKellen that seem to be intended to deepen or humanize his character, but instead just make him feel less iconic and less interesting.

Sadly, Caviezel is not nearly as interesting to watch, and you'll quickly find yourself missing Patrick McGoohan's savage conviction.

There are a few other bright spots, though — the cinematography is great, the desert looks really vivid and beautiful, and the production values are amazing. There are one or two moments of amazing subversiveness and cleverness sprinkled in, and you wish the rest of the show could have been more like them. The show seems on the verge of saying something really interesting once or twice.

But for the most part, watching this new version of The Prisoner feels like you're doing hard time. I would avoid at all costs.

The Prisoner airs tonight, and for the next two nights following on AMC at 8 PM.

Talking to Comic Book Resources, Kirkman said,

The thing that makes "The Walking Dead" unique and interesting is that it's a zombie movie that never ends – that's the log line or whatever. To do a zombie movie that's based on that? Kinda dumb. The whole idea behind the book is that it's a long-term exploration on the characters and their situation and how they're dealing with these problems over a long period of time, the different things that happen to the characters and how it affects and changes the characters. You can do that in a series of movies, but it's not ideal. It's not really common for people to go, "Oh, I'll buy this thing and commit to making 10 movies based on it!" So, the TV show makes way more sense to me for all of those reasons.

The creator, a partner at Image Comics since last year, also reassured fans of the comic that this won't replace the original series:

[The TV show will] be 110% faithful in tone, but I don't know that every single character will be exactly the same and I don't know if every single character will actually make it into the show, just because there are about 45 characters in the comic so far. But like I said, it's very early on in the process... If it goes past the pilot, I'll be writing episodes and looking over the storylines for the series and I'll be pretty hands on. I will be as hands on as working in comics will allow me to be. If it gets to a point where the work in comics is slowing up, I'll step back and leave [the series] in the very capable hands of whoever's working on the show... My main commitment is to the comics. I want to be the first guy in history that's gotten a movie or TV deal and continued to put out his comic series uninterrupted. As a fan, I hate it when it's like, "Oh, that's awesome, there's gonna be a TV show… and now the comic is gone. What the F!" I've already talked to Charlie Adlard [the artist of "The Walking Dead"] about it and we definitely want to keep the series without interruptions. So, that comes first.

The Walking Dead pilot, written and directed by The Shawshank Redemption and The Mist's Frank Darabont, is currently in pre-production. The Walking Dead comic series is available now.

Kirkman Talks "Walking Dead" TV [Comic Book Resources]

Variety reports that the cable station is close to inking a deal with Frank Darabont, writer and director of such films as The Green Mile and The Shawshank Redemption, to develop a cable series based on Robert Kirkman's popular series. The series begins several weeks after a zombie outbreak has left the United States in ruins, shutting down the country's infrastructure and killing most of the living population. Police officer Rick Grimes has woken from a coma, to find the world he once knew destroyed. He travels to Atlanta in search of his wife and son. There, he bands with a group of fellow survivors, and together they try to survive a world where the conveniences of modern life are a distant memory, and flesh-hungry zombies scour the land.

As over-exposed as zombies have become, there's plenty of reason to be excited for a Walking Dead television series. While humans certainly do fall to the zombies, the comic book series is no typical undead gorefest. It's about the things that happen after the apocalypse — about how the characters adjust to the new realities of their universe, and the decisions and changes they must make to survive. It's not a story that would work within the confines of a two-hour feature film, but on television it could offer a vision of the apocalypse that we don't usually see. And with Darabont at the helm, TV zombies could be as smartly depicted as 1960s advertising executives.

[Variety]

On whether or not he pictured original series lead Patrick McGoohan when writing the series:

No, I deliberately didn't do that, I didn't think of an actor at all... I won't cast it in my head, because then I box myself in, and I can't do that. It has to be this imaginary character. I didn't have McGoohan in my head because [this Prisoner] is a different kind of Number Six, he's a different character, he has different attitudes. In the beginning of the series, Six wakes up the middle of the desert, no idea where he is, no idea how he got there, no idea what to do, and immediately he's hurled into an event, which is this old man is trying to escape, he's being pursued by soldiers. And he rescues this old man. For me, in my head, that's McGoohan, the old Six. And that old man dies. In my head, he dies to allow us to imagine a new Number Six. McGoohan said that the end plate on the old series should've said "The Beginning," because the cycle goes on, and so in my imagination, [that scene is where] one cycle ends and another cycle begins. And so that scene allowed me to imagine my own Number Six.

On easter eggs from the old show:

There are lots of little things. Some of them are visual, some of them are story, stories that we were inspired by, and also some of them are little lines of dialogue. One of the difficulties we have is that we're aiming for 45 minute episodes and some of them come in very long, we have to cut for story, so some of that gets lost, unfortunately. But there's still a good deal of it in the show. Partly as a way of building on that series, partly as a little fun thing, and partly thematic... This bloody place goes on and on and on, you know? In episode two, Six gets involved in a trip to a place called Escape Resort, and when you go to Escape Resort, it's like the original Village, and people are dressed like they were in the original Village.

On whether the new show is a sequel:

I can see why you'd say that, I talk about it being cyclical, but I have to think about it on different layers and different levels, to imagine it. It's not sequential in that, this happens then that happens, not at all, and my approach was not to recreate it, and not to reinvent it, but to respond to the original. If they said that, what do we say?

On the thematic differences between the original and the new series:

McGoohan's piece was based upon the assertion of the individual, and I allowed myself to look at it in the polar opposite way. What happens if the cult of the individual is allowed to run? We're all obsessed with self, we're all obsessed with more, and now, and me, and gimme... and what happens if that's affected us, and what if that kind of world, what are the consequences of that? McGoohan says, 'Look. We live in a world which is authoritarian, and we've got to break it.' What if we live in a society now that's selfish and dangerous?

On who the bad guys are:

There is a strand of fear in [the series], but that fear comes from the world that Six comes from. He fears the people around him: Who are you, you know? He doesn't know who he can trust, so trust is a big theme of the series... If you were to say that [in the era of the original series] it was Communism, it was West versus East, then what is it now? It's a different kind of threat, it's an unknowable threat. How do you battle that? In terms of the Village, when Six first comes to the Village, there are acts of terrorism, and what he comes to believe is that the terrorism is by the state itself within the village... That 'State versus State' thing seems to have gone, we have to come at the kind of threats at a different level.

On the way the series ends:

The final episode has a climax, it has a conclusion, there's a reversal, and there's explanations and revelations, but they're not conventional, and I hope they'll be shocking, you know, that people will not expect this ending at all. What I hope is that, what we get in the end is more disturbing than where we were at the beginning... When we get to the end, what I hope is that people will get challenged by it, and disturbed by it, in the way that the original challenged and disturbed. What I hope people will feel is that there's a sense of, 'I know what that's about, I think I know, oh my God, this was that and that was this, so that's how it works. But I don't like it.

This is the first glimpse of actual footage from the miniseries, which stars McKellen as Number Two and Jim Caviezel of Outlander fame as Number Six. It's hard to tell much from such a short promo, although it does look like this new version of The Prisoner is making the most of its location work. Considering they went to the deserts of Namibia for much of shooting, you'd really expect nothing less.

As much as nothing can ever match something as iconic as the original Prisoner's Portmeirion setting - hell, nothing can ever match the original Prisoner, period - this new version has found something in the desert locations that's almost as impressive in its own right.

Being a diehard fan of The Prisoner, I'm pretty sure I should hate this new miniseries on principle, but the stars seem to keep aligning for this project, and this promo only makes me more excited. Ian McKellen looks awesomely malevolent as Number Two, I've been looking forward to more from Jim Caviezel ever since he teamed up with the Vikings to defeat the Moorwen, and AMC's other original projects, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, are two of the best shows on TV. You know what, Prisoner remake? I'll definitely be seeing you this November. I can't believe I just wrote that...

[Collider]

The adaptation of Robinson's 1992 novel is coming from an unlikely source: Jonathan Hensleigh, the writer of Bruce Willis astronaut disaster movie, Armageddon. Hensleigh, whose other credits include Die Hard With A Vengence and 2004's The Punisher, will be the writer and executive producer of the series which AMC's VP of original programming Jeremy Elice calls more character-driven than you may be expecting: "It's not the spectacle of sci-fi that you typically see." Not that there won't be any spectacle, as Christina Wayne, senior VP of original series and miniseries at the cable channel explains:

This fits in with our bigger vision of wanting series that feel like cinematic one-hour movies... We're always looking for big genres but to do them in slightly different ways so they feel fresh and new.

The series is just one of a number currently in preparation at AMC for a 2009 start, including a series based on Glen David Gold's Carter Beats The Devil.

AMC plans Mars mission [Hollywood Reporter]

Unlike the original show - which used a real-life town in Wales as The Village, the secret town populated by spies and n'erdowells that tried to break Patrick McGoohan's Number Six - the new version of the show is being filmed in Africa's Swakopmund: a former German settlement than requires a lot of set construction:

[The Prisoner Production Blog]

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I think everyone on the cast and crew seems most excited about the modern-day twist. Producer Trevor Hopkins explains that Bill Gallagher's script doesn't try to copy the original show, which is probably a good thing. Instead the new version is more about post 9/11 security issues.

It's the first time our post-9/11 anxieties have been merged with a tripped-out 1960s style, so it'll be interesting to see how it meshes. I'm excited to see how they'll pump the inhabitants of the Village for information, Prisoner-style, yet remain true to modern times.

But even more intriguing is the pairing of Jim Caviezel as Number 6 and Ian McKellen as the authority figure Number 2. Caviezel replaces Patrick McGoohan's defiance with an air of "Holy crap, I'm confused — what's going on? I'm not a number." And McKellen is just a first class actor all the way. Let the whacked-out battle of wits commence.

[AMC]

The new version of the series - co-produced by ITV in the UK, which gave us the original show - will be a six-hour miniseries that reboots the concept of Caviezel's nameless secret agent being kidnapped to the mysterious "Village," where people are known only by numbers and everyone is out to find out what secrets everyone else is hiding. Sir Ian McKellen has signed on to play main badguy Number Two for the entire run, replacing the revolving "Number Two of The Week" guest-slot of the original show.

The show is expected to premiere midway through next year.

Ian McKellen to lead in ITV's The Prisoner remake [The Guardian]

"The elevators are in control of (the strangers') destiny, whittling them out by deciding who they deem deserve to go up," Seltzer said. And what happens in the sealed-off high rise has much larger repercussions.

The set-up sounds similar to "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream," the famous Harlan Ellison story about a sentient computer who molests the last surviving humans until they kill each other. But the idea that the struggle of the humans in the massive office building affects the rest of the world could become a juicy metaphor for information-age alienation. We hope. Image by HTTP2007.

AMC Builds Sci-Fi With '99 Stories' [Hollywood Reporter]