Patrick McGoohan's death at age 80 this week, announced Tuesday, was a sad event -- made sadder by the realization that, in the media world of 2009, few editors and opinion-makers seemed to know or care who he was and what he contributed to TV alone.
McGoohan played two of the best adversaries ever to face Peter Falk on Columbo. But most of all, he played Number 6, the never-named secret agent who has abducted to a mysterious island and subjected to all manner of mental games on that classic 1968 CBS series, The Prisoner.
The Prisoner was absolutely, uncompromisingly brilliant -- so far ahead of its time that much of it seems fresh today, down to the Beatles music in its climax, Number 6's weekly battles of wits with an ever-replaced Number 2, and, at the end, a famously cryptic ending in which interpretations were as open-ended as the non-ending of The Sopranos.
(My take, for the record: Yes, Number 6 and Number 1 were one and the same. Just as, now as in the Sixties, we are all prisoners of our own devices.)
AMC is presenting a remake of The Prisoner this year, and we'll see if it can approach, much less equal, the original. In 1968, The Prisoner arrived as a summer replacement series for The Jackie Gleason Show, and its 17 episodes (the show actually was a lengthy weekly miniseries) were astoundingly surrealistic, multilayered and addictive.
It was Lost, two generations ago... yet the reason McGoohan, who created the series as well as starred in it, got little notice for his passing this week is because The Prisoner, sadly, is at this moment fading from pop-culture memory. Shame, shame, shame.
To revisit the old episodes, read Diane Werts' FOR BETTER OR WERTS blog today -- click to find it HERE -- and follow her directions on how to find them online.
Nice to know, though, that the original computer guru of this website, Chris Spurgeon, checked in with an appreciative private email. So good, I'm making it public:
"Shows like Lost owe everything to The Prisoner, a show that was decades ahead of its time (what WAS a typical prime time drama the summer The Prisoner premiered? I don't remember, but they were pretty damn low on the challenge-the-viewer-scale, I bet).
"I seem to recall that The Prisoner was the summer replacement for The Jackie Gleason Show, right? There must be people out there who STILL haven't recovered from the cognitive dissonance of tuning in for another safe week of Gleason and getting tossed into The Village instead."
I'm one of them. And by the way, Chris, since you asked: Some other TV shows airing that summer of '68? Actually, it wasn't a bad year, especially for a summer crop. I Spy, The Monkees, Star Trek, The Avengers, He and She, Judd for the Defense, Get Smart and Mission: Impossible were all on the air that summer.
And so was The Summer Brothers Smothers Show, the summer-replacement series hosted by Glen Campbell, for which executive producer Tom Smothers gave the first TV jobs to such young writer-performers as Steve Martin and Rob Reiner.
Oh, yeah, the Smothers Brothers. Gotta go. Back to my book...
But I salute you, Mr. McGoohan. The Prisoner was just the sort of bold, innovative show that, as a teenager, made me recognize and appreciate great TV. Tom and Dick, that goes for you, too...