A number of reviewers have said that this series was "ahead of its time". Actually, as with any truly insightful art, it was entirely with it's time, it was all the other shows that were slightly backward.
Because of that, the series has dated in rather odd ways; the use of the Beatles' "All you need is love" in the final episode, for instance, really derives its power from the fact that Lennon and McCartney laced a lot of their songs with the same satirical venom this episode portrays, but much of this was lost on audiences (at least in America) until the release of the White Album. But now, 40 years later, only a handful of "Beatle-philes" remember this, so the edginess of the hallway sequence in which this is played has changed somewhat.
Too, the Theater of the Absurd that functions as backdrop to much of this show has been all but forgotten - Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" still gets revived now and again, but Albee's "Sandlot" never does; Brecht, once thought to be the Shakespeare of Left-wing theater, remains only as an inventive apologist for a failed Stalinism who wrote a few memorable set-pieces.
Yet "The Prisoner" survives, and likely will continue to survive, because it demonstrated both the potential power and the ultimate limitations of it's medium. There was never a show like this previous to it, and there has never been a show like it since, because the notion of a political/cultural satire extended for thirteen weeks for a mass audience is really unthinkable in television terms. How McGoohan came up with the idea therefore remains a mystery, but somehow he got it made. That there were millions willing to devote time and the effort of attention to it remains equally mysterious; but I think part of the answer is that at the time, many of us still weren't sure what the "television phenomenon" actually was. We didn't recognize it as mere audio-visual wall-paper, we thought it could be something else; and "The Prisoner" offered us a something else, something in keeping with what we had learned of great satire in letters, such as Swift and Voltaire.
Television as a medium has exhausted itself; it can never escape its economics, and so can never again be thought of a potentially liberating art-form. But there was a time when it was possible to imagine otherwise....
Not every episode is equally good, but "The Prisoner" remains brilliant, disturbing, visionary, and probably will for a long time to come.
Because of that, the series has dated in rather odd ways; the use of the Beatles' "All you need is love" in the final episode, for instance, really derives its power from the fact that Lennon and McCartney laced a lot of their songs with the same satirical venom this episode portrays, but much of this was lost on audiences (at least in America) until the release of the White Album. But now, 40 years later, only a handful of "Beatle-philes" remember this, so the edginess of the hallway sequence in which this is played has changed somewhat.
Too, the Theater of the Absurd that functions as backdrop to much of this show has been all but forgotten - Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" still gets revived now and again, but Albee's "Sandlot" never does; Brecht, once thought to be the Shakespeare of Left-wing theater, remains only as an inventive apologist for a failed Stalinism who wrote a few memorable set-pieces.
Yet "The Prisoner" survives, and likely will continue to survive, because it demonstrated both the potential power and the ultimate limitations of it's medium. There was never a show like this previous to it, and there has never been a show like it since, because the notion of a political/cultural satire extended for thirteen weeks for a mass audience is really unthinkable in television terms. How McGoohan came up with the idea therefore remains a mystery, but somehow he got it made. That there were millions willing to devote time and the effort of attention to it remains equally mysterious; but I think part of the answer is that at the time, many of us still weren't sure what the "television phenomenon" actually was. We didn't recognize it as mere audio-visual wall-paper, we thought it could be something else; and "The Prisoner" offered us a something else, something in keeping with what we had learned of great satire in letters, such as Swift and Voltaire.
Television as a medium has exhausted itself; it can never escape its economics, and so can never again be thought of a potentially liberating art-form. But there was a time when it was possible to imagine otherwise....
Not every episode is equally good, but "The Prisoner" remains brilliant, disturbing, visionary, and probably will for a long time to come.