Patrick McGoohan (1928-2009)

I just got the surprising and sad news that Patrick McGoohan passed away in Los Angeles yesterday after a short illness.

McGoohan—who I just learned was born in Astoria—appeared on stage and acted and directed and wrote in an assortment of movies and television programs. The reason I am stopping everything to write about him is that, in the late 1960s, McGoohan managed to combine his talents to create the brilliant television program The Prisoner.

I've written about The Prisoner before on this blog and elsewhere. In case you need a refresher, it was a short television series about a British secret agent who resigns and finds himself in a bizarre place called The Village, where everyone is known by a number and where the leadership tries to manipulate him into revealing why he resigned. Just about every episode revolves around the retired spy's efforts to outsmart and escape his captors.

The storylines of The Prisoner could have been as rudimentary as that of a simple videogame, but under McGoohan's leadership the show went in an apposite direction. The visuals for the series remain stunning: a colorful blend of 1960s pop stylings with the eccentric retro-design of the Portmeirion resort village of Wales. The soundtrack was unusually catchy and playful; the scripts were clever and puzzling and steeped in edgy satire punctuated by powerful pathos; the actors seemed to rise to the occasion and truly belong to The Prisoner's dystopian world. I'm not sure the very end of the series is a success, but I respect the experimentalism of the whole series and the many powerful moments it has to offer. The only other television series I can think of that offered the same type of risk-taking and satisfaction is Twin Peaks, though I'm sure there are other worthy candidates, including Lost. (The Singing Detective and other Dennis Potter works are works of genius, but for the moment I'll consider them as belonging to a different genre.)

I don't recall seeing The Prisoner when it originally aired (though I might've seen fragments of it); I caught up with it when it was re-aired by PBS in the late 1970s. Attracted by the advance publicity and totally riveted by the first episode, I watched the rest of the series religiously and even refused to answer the phone while it was on—something I had never done before and would rarely do afterward. I devoured the Starlog magazine that included an episode guide. I even had like-minded friends over for a Prisoner party and got into Marvin Kitman's Newsday column with a petition (co-spearheaded by The Other Dave) that, if memory serves, had to do with keeping the show on the air.

Since then, The Prisoner has become much easier to see due to video. It's been "quoted" on The Simpsons and sort of cribbed in The Truman Show. The long talked-about remakes seem to be more imminent than ever—and the messages and themes of The Prisoner remain relevant more than 40 years after its creation by Patrick McGoohan. Standards of privacy and individuality continue to erode in a global village that seems more engulfing by the minute.

So see it if you haven't already. Here's how it begins....



Source (2:24)

WWW."I just realized it's been ten years since I saw The Prisoner for the first time. Has any TV show ever been better? Why hasn't there been more TV like that? In my mind I can still see and hear the show's opening--the music's been in my head all day."--Journal entry, circa June 1978, found in a set of drawers in Portmeiron, Wales, in April 1984



Source (9:44)

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Photo: David Marc Fischer