The Prisoner
I have just completed possibly the most painful TV viewing experience in recent memory, all 17 episodes of The Prisoner, the 1966/7 series apparently about a cold-war era spy who resigned his post and was then kidnapped and taken to "The Village", where various means were used to elicit the reason for his resignation. I was curious to watch it because I'd heard of the series many years ago when a primitive Apple II game based on the series was a popular pastime in the computer store that I worked at.
The series started out well: intriguing and mysterious. The Village is a visually interesting place, and the characters that populate it are uniformly odd and therefore entertaining for some time. Toward the middle, things got a little tiresome and the writing and acting became a little uneven. But then something, somewhere went terribly wrong and the show took a left turn into the completely bizarre and just fucking weird. The last two episodes in particular -- supposedly the finale that would wrap up the series -- were just entirely incomprehensible. Of course, the events of that episode were so strange and apparently random that I expect some dedicated fans can extract some sort of symbolism, but to my weary eyes it was just a huge steaming pile.
Kind of a cool idea, but ran out of gas pretty quickly.
The series started out well: intriguing and mysterious. The Village is a visually interesting place, and the characters that populate it are uniformly odd and therefore entertaining for some time. Toward the middle, things got a little tiresome and the writing and acting became a little uneven. But then something, somewhere went terribly wrong and the show took a left turn into the completely bizarre and just fucking weird. The last two episodes in particular -- supposedly the finale that would wrap up the series -- were just entirely incomprehensible. Of course, the events of that episode were so strange and apparently random that I expect some dedicated fans can extract some sort of symbolism, but to my weary eyes it was just a huge steaming pile.
Kind of a cool idea, but ran out of gas pretty quickly.
posted by Brent at 3:33 PM
1 Comments:
Tell me about it! The only reason I have to try and finish watching them is I feel I have to justify the bandwidth it took to download them. I feel a little guilty for having wasted 15 hours of your life, sorry.
I hope TV and movie producers learn one valuable lesson from series like The Prisoner. If you're going to let your writers take drugs, make sure they're writing comedy!
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