AMC’s The Prisoner
At 408, we watch a whole lot of television. Maybe I should speak for myself, I watch a lot of television. Recently, I’ve been seeing so many commercials for AMC’s new mini-series, The Prisoner. It’s a remake of the 1968 BBC classic, and from the first two episodes, I’d have to say it’s worth a look or two.
The basic premise of the show was pretty obvious from the commercials. It’s your usual, man wakes up in the desert and doesn’t know how he got there. Man finds himself in a village where everyone’s name is a number and they only eat wraps. Creepy old dude keeps showing up and fucking with your head. Also there’s big white bubbles that eat people; we’ve seen it all before.
So when I sat down to watch a little TV after my run today, I was surprised to finally find out that the show was actually playing, so I watched.
I’m not going to sit here and critique it, because what the hell do I know about TV show making. Ultimately, it seems pretty cool. They’re probably trying to be a little too surreal with the confusing memory sequences, the random mysterious cuts of #2, and the dialogue is a little over-the-top.
But it also doesn’t take itself too seriously, given little oddities like the fact that they only eat wraps. There is a sequence in the second episode in which a little girl explains the plot of a village soap-opera, full of references to characters’ number names.
I looked into it a little further and found that it was a remake of a 1968 BBC miniseries. I’ve never heard of it, so I just found a torrent of it to check it out. I need a new TV show to waste my time watching!
Oh, right, one thing I’d suggest to AMC as a fan, would be to lay off the lame commercial interruptions. I don’t need to know stupid little non-factoids every commercial break and I don’t really care that it’s coming back in exactly 1 minute… by the way I timed it and it wasn’t exactly 1 minute.