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(Sorry for any typos, my fingers are freezing as the heat is out)
The show certainly doesn't preclude criticism, it welcomes it. Why else throw mad imagery at the viewer one moment and then develop a traditional 'love story' the next? It wants you to think, but not about what time of day it is, what direction Number Six is coming from in shot 45 to shot 46 or why Rover does X Y and Z.
The story is, little children, that McGoohan was riding the high of Danger Man at the time, offered the role of 007 and basically had the world in his hands as far as pop icons go. He wrapped up Danger Man and one his advisors, an ex-government employee, asked him jokingly where secret agents go when they retire. Wheels turned in his heads and he pushed for the most ambitious and frankly expensive program done at the time.
Writing and acting in the key episodes, McGoohan's scheme was to vaguely use the character from Danger Man mixed with his own public persona (hence using his glamor headshot in the opening sequence getting X'd out and in the election episode). His aim was to confuse and disorient the viewer with the expected fight sequences and tropes of action dramas like Danger Man but also include a terrifying analyzation of the modern world.
The viewer is asked to believe that the 'hero' is kidnapped and stick on an island where every extravagance is provided except for freedom. Every other 'inmate' on the island is shown to be either a tool, cog, or victim of the island's administration mission to drag secrets or cause the population to participate in a mass confession and join the happy blank-faced holiday makers who obscure the fact that they are dressed in stripes by adding straw hats and other festive clothing.
As the program carries on it starts to become clear to even the casual viewer that the program is not exactly about a spy stuck on an island run by a foreign power, but is actually making a statement about the world. The program goes as far as aping itself with the episode 'The Girl Who Was Death' where we see an action program reduced to a children's story.
With breathtaking location work, innovative direction and camera work, the Prisoner was a great success but only after years had passed. The conclusion of the last episode caused such an uproar that McGoohan fled the UK and even now refuses to answer direct questions about the show, instead asking the viewer to make their own decisions since all the answers are in the episodes. This stance is certainly not a cop out as again, even the most casual viewer can see that the Prisoner operates on both a casual TV viewing level and on a high level of art and existential thought.
There seems to be some problem here with what are largely the props of the show such as 'well why did he get attacked in episide X and not Y' which is missing the forest from the trees, saying far more about the viewer than the program.
As far as the acting being a problem, I can't help you there. Several TV shows are talked about here that don't exactly feature polished acting. The Prisoner utilized acting styles of its time is all the help I can give you.
No other program ever attempted such a thing and the only one to my mind to try it since is 'Nowhere Man' which was seen by three men and a dog on UPN in 1995. The very concept to use TV as a trick to get people thinking, to upset them and get them to question the quaint world they live in is, for want of a better word, revolutionary.
I can understand someone being annoyed by the style of the show, the jaggedness of it and McGoohan himself, but I just can't figure anyone taking the time to critique the show and miss such large points like what I pointed out above.
Besides, it deeply influenced the minds of several artists that are much loved here, the least of them being Grant Morrison, whom I sure would agree would be a VERY different writer without the Prisoner. |
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