So now that the first two hours of AMC's remake of The Prisoner have already aired, you've had a chance to form your own impressions of the sandy, angsty reimagining of the 1967 classic. (The remaining four hours air tonight and tomorrow night.)

Maybe it's unfair to compare this show to the original — but if the producers didn't want that, they should have called it something different. And honestly, even if you pretend that the original show never existed, this snorefest still wouldn't be winning me over, with its vacuous mysteries and uninvolving plot twists. After reading the comments on my preview post yesterday, I'm aware that some people are really enjoying this remake so far, and I'd love to hear more about what you liked about it. Maybe you'll even change my mind — but for now, I'm still on the side of the haters.

So here are the six main changes from the original that really didn't work for me at all.

6) Humanizing Number 2. I really would have loved to have seen Sir Ian McKellen portraying Number 2 as he was in the original series — especially the Leo McKern version. Instead, we got McKellen playing a much more human figure, who's got a comatose wife and a rebellious teenage son. I can see how this felt like a great idea, because it lets McKellen do more Acting, switching from smiling patriarch of the Village to tormented father and husband. But it also kind of erases the point of Number 2, which is that he's a kind of archetypal authority figure. I also couldn't quite bring myself to care about Number 2's son, and his relationship with Number 2. There was just too much staring into space for my liking.

And when Number 2 managed to be more like the classic version, it was great. The bit where Number 6 says "If I open my mind, you'll take it away from me," and Number 2 responds "Maybe we will. But we always give it back," was great and left me wishing for more of those moments. Why couldn't we have had more of a battle of wills — and wits — between 6 and 2? Which brings me to:

5) Wimpifying Number 6. Science-fiction author Steven Barnes puts it best: This show should have given us Jason Bourne in the Village. If you're going to update the premise, give us an updated James Bond-esque superspy battling against the one enemy he can't overpower: excessive normality and niceness.

Instead, we get a Number 6 who's just sort of a schlubby, ordinary guy, a pencil pusher at some big corporation who resigned because he felt kinda bad about stuff. And nobody even cares why he resigned anyway, they just want him to settle in and live in the Village. It's all a bit underplayed — and because Number 6 is so non-formidable, the Village becomes less scary as well. It doesn't take that much to keep this Number 6 down, and that means the Village doesn't need to muster much power or cleverness.

4) Bringing in the evil corporation. I get it — the Cold War is over, and now the biggest threat to our individual liberty is evil corporations. Which is why they've become such a cliche of late. But the evil SummaKor, the company that Number 6 resigns from, feels like the blandest stereotype of a corporate monster, and we never really fear it. We never really know who's behind the original 1967 Village, but it feels like Brave New World mashed up with 1984. Knowing (or at least suspecting, after two hours) that Enron is the Big Bad this time around just feels a bit cheap somehow. Good job, Ralph Nader.

3) Toning down the surrealism. Every now and then, this show lets rip with the surrealistic, bizarre touches. I love the fact that the only food that you can eat in the Village is "wraps" — it's like my worst airport food nightmare. I utterly adore the psychiatrist and his weird doppelganger in episode two. And I'm completely obsessed with the freaky soap opera that everyone in the Village watches obsessively.

If the whole show had been more like that, I would be singing its praises. But those moments are few and far between, sadly, and the rest of the show feels too pedestrian and, weirdly, too anchored in our reality. There are basically two ways to go with a Prisoner reboot — in an era that's already seen David Lynch and David Cronenberg, you can try to out-Lynch Lynch and go for the full-on crazy. Or you can go for a more conventional spy thriller, of the type Patrick McGoohan would have sneered at. But this show didn't really commit to either direction.

2) Toning down the totalitarianism. The Village should be oppressive and conformist, and above all creepy, with everyone playing their parts with apparent cheer and good humor. Instead, everyone in the 2009 Village seems a bit grumpy, and nobody is particularly subtle about their dislike of the place. It's never entirely clear how these people are being kept down, also — we glimpse the giant balloon, Rover, a few times, but not enough to make the single bubble seem like enough to keep everyone down. Every now and then, someone is dragged off to the Clinic or other terrible locations, never to be seen again — but the Village just doesn't feel powerful enough to keep down the resentment that emanates from every single person in it. These people don't seem to be co-opted enough, for the Village to feel believable. (And generally, the show is so low-energy, that you wind up wondering if people are just too sleepy to fight back against the Village.)

1) That whole "OMG the Village is hollow and I haz touched the sky" thing. When I said yesterday that there was one major change that bothered me more than any other, this is what I meant. We're hit over the head, in those first two hours, with the idea that everyone in the Village believes it's the only place in the world. You might as well believe in aliens as believe there's such a place as New York or London, Number 2 says at one point.

For various reasons, this just doesn't work for me at all, and feels like a really bad decision — if the Village is the only place in the world, then escape really is impossible. And questions like whether Number 6 is a number and why he resigned become sort of academic — the only context in which Number 6 could ever exist is here. It also makes the Villagers seem a bit idiotic, since they never ask the obvious questions like where all their food and gadgets and things come from — we never see enough farms or factories to make all that stuff.

But mostly, it turns the conflict between Number 2 and Number 6 into a debate over whether the outside world exists. Which feels really dull and done to death, in ways that the original 2-versus-6 conflict never did. We've gotten a million stories where people are stuck in an isolated enclave and taught that nothing else exists, and it's one of the dullest plots you can do. Plus, for us the viewers at home, there's never any doubt that yes, New York does exist. So any potential ambiguity or ability for us to identify with the Villagers goes out the window.

But enough of my blasphemous free-thinking critiques. What did you guys think?

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.

It's going to be weird seeing Rover in the middle of the desert — it doesn't feel quite as intuitive. But at least it looks like they kept the same basic design and classic milky evilness. Glad to see the new show isn't throwing all of Patrick McGoohan's style points out the window.

Update: Thanks to PVIII for pointing it out: There's also a nine minute preview video of the new series!

[Posters via SpoilerTV]

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.

Here's a pretty great interview with McGoohan from 1977. Asked why he decided to help create The Prisoner, he explains it was all due to "boredom" with television and with society. He pitched the show to financier Lew Grade on a Saturday morning, and had the budget to start making the show the following Monday. McGoohan thought his concept would only sustain seven scripts, but Grade insisted on a full season of 26. In the end, they managed to eke out 17.

The Prisoner, the story of a spy who decides to resign, and then finds himself kidnapped and trapped in an idyllic village where everyone is a number and the village leaders are trying to break him. McGoohan explained:

It was a place that is trying to destroy the individual by every means possible; trying to break his spirit, so that he accepts that he is No. 6 and will live there happily as No. 6 for ever after. And this is the one rebel that they can't break.

Over the show's run, it becomes more and more surreal and disturbing, culminating in a final episode whose significance people are still debating. (You can watch all of the show's episodes on the AMC website, courtesy of the people who are remaking the show.)

And here's McGoohan on the danger of aiming your entertainment at a particular audience or genre:

You see, one of the t'ings that is frustrating about making a piece of entertainment is trying to make it appeal to everybody. I think this is fatal. I don't think you can do that. It's done a great deal, you know. We have our horror movies and we have our science-fiction things. The best works are those that say...somebody says, "We want to do something this way," and do it, not because they're aiming at a particular audience. They're doing it because it's a story they think is important, and is a statement that they want to make. And they do it and then whoever want to watch it, that's their privilege. I mean, the painting in an art gallery, you know, you have a choice whether you go and look at this one or that one or the other one. You have a choice not even to go in.

McGoohan famously turned down the roles of James Bond and Simon Templair (in The Saint.) Instead of being content to embody the "secret agent" archetype, he chose to reinvent it. We're all a lot richer as a result.

The photos come from Kerrin Kokot, AMC's multimedia producer, who also offers commentary about each image that suggests that we're not about to be give a straight-up homage to Patrick McGoohan's paranoia:

Another fond memory the photos have triggered is from Cape Town's Bijoux building, home to The Prisoner's nightclub set. For spoiler reasons, those pictures will have to stay under wraps for now, but let me paint you a picture of my own: Two "dancing extras" were asked to come show their moves in the club. Little did they know that they'd be kitted out in saucy little outfits and caged. The extras — one of whom did a varsity project with me years ago — laughed when they realized that they were to be strippers, not belly dancers. They didn't remove any clothing, of course, but they moved with an intent that got the point across. Suffice it to say, this production isn't The Prisoner you remember.

We can also see desert scenes, churches and underground tunnels where the new Number Six (played by Jim Caviezel) will find himself chased by men with dogs... all of which sounds exciting enough, but if someone doesn't get caned by a midget at some point during the whole thing, I'm going to have to complain.

The Prisoner Production's Greatest Hits, Vol. I, Vol II [AMCtv.com]

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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]

Famous Names: Patrick McGoohan (Creator/Star).

Crunchy Goodness: 4

Spin-Offs: A big-screen adaptation's been rumored for years; DC Comics published a graphic-novel 'sequel' in 1988.

Bang for Your Buck: The killer weather balloon, 'Rover.'

Deadliest Spoiler: He gets out! Or does he?

The Anorak's Guide to The Prisoner