Remaking The Prisoner

Regular readers will know that I am not the world’s biggest fan of the remake as a concept. Either something is being remade because it was really good/influential, and as a result the remake struggles to live up to what went before, or it is being remade because the makers can’t think of anything else to do. And so they end up trying to polish a turd. Which, let’s be honest, never goes tremendously well.

There was something inevitable about a remake of The Prisoner. The original was, well, influential – people remember it, but if you actually sit down and watch it, the quality is variable. In fact, the show moved from intriguing to largely unwatchable over the course of 17 episodes. But people still talk about it, and remember it fondly. So there is a natural, ready-made audience for it.

I gave the remake a go. It is recognisably the same series, but with a couple of flaws. First of all, all of the character of the original setting is lost. Instead, it is set in a desert which is a pretty boring setting once the initial novelty wears off. And that happens within the first five minutes. But in a sense the boredom of the desert is perfect for this version of The Prisoner, because it is boring. It is really, really boring. It is so boring that I would happily sit in a dark room in silence rather than watch another episode of it. At least the silence of the dark room would be more interesting that the The Prisoner.

For all of its glaring problems, at least the original version of The Prisoner was never boring. It was often poorly acted nonsense, with no sense of plot, but at least it was diverting. The same cannot be said for the remake. It is beyond dull. The new Number 6 lacks anything even approaching charisma. The original Number 6 had no end of ways to demonstrate his rage at being imprisoned – scowling, gurning, shouting, stomping, being rude and laughing in a way that was simultaneously derisive and slightly constipated. The new Number 6 just appears a bit put out by his imprisonment, and if there was something good on the TV he’d probably just forget about it. Furthermore, Ian McKellen – as Number 2 – is a bit, well, number two. He’s phoning in his performance, clearly hoping that the shoot ends sooner rather than later so he can get back to real acting work. And as for the other people in the show, well, I can’t remember them. They were instantly forgettable.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is that The Prisoner was novel in the 1960s. Nowadays, there is no shortage of high concept shows being aired on TV. And a lot of these are built around an enigma – of putting interesting characters in crazy scenarios surrounded by mystery. I mean, that’s the basic premise of Life On Mars and Ashes to Ashes. However, those two shows realise that it is not enough to just create a mysterious scenario – you need to have interesting characters and great plots as well. That’s where the remake of The Prisoner falls own, and why it falls down so badly – it is a concept in search of a plot, characters, and also in search of something to make you want to watch week after week.

Of course, I only watched two and a half episodes (I fell asleep watching the third episode) so it is possible that the series suddenly got a lot better. But I doubt it somehow. Remaking a show that ended up just going through the motions is never going to work if you go through the motions from the first minute of episode one. There is a scope for a re-imagining of The Prisoner that takes the premise of the show and does something interesting with it – much as the remake of Battlestar Galactica did with its unpromising source material. Unfortunately, this version took the premise of the show and made it really dull.

They really shouldn’t have bothered.