J.J. Abrams has popularized the “mystery box” genre (and put a name to it) since the pilot episode of Lost introduced a smoke monster and a polar bear on a tropical island with absolutely no explanation. For six long seasons, Lost kept bombarding its audience with twists and turns and unanswered questions, until it had too many loose ends for its series finale to be anything other than a crushing disappointment. Abrams has become the poster boy for mystery-box storytelling, but he wasn’t the first to do it.
More than a decade before Lost premiered, David Lynch brought his distinctive cinematic vision to the small screen and co-created Twin Peaks with Mark Frost. Twin Peaks has all the hallmarks of a small-town soap opera — over-the-top melodrama, a sprawling cast of colorful characters, and a litany of interpersonal complications between all of them — but it also has a dark, supernatural, unmistakably Lynchian underbelly. There’s a portal to a hellish alternate dimension on the edge of town, and that dimension kept viewers engaged with a steady stream of paranormal phenomena every bit as baffling as Lost’s polar bears or Yellowjackets’ pit girl or any of the machinations from The X-Files’ “mytharc.”
But not even Twin Peaks was the first true mystery-box show. Twin Peaks and Lost and Fringe and Severance and all these mystery-box shows exist in the long, looming shadow of The Prisoner. A full 23 years before audiences got a taste of the cherry pie in Twin Peaks, The Prisoner aired 17 episodes on ITV and became the cult classic to end all cult classics.
The Prisoner stars Patrick McGoohan (who also created the series) as a Bond-style British superspy who furiously quits his job, gets abducted from his home, and finds himself marooned in a strange village with seemingly no means of escape. Without The Prisoner, we wouldn’t have Twin Peaks or Lost or any of these other cryptic mystery-unboxing mind-benders.
Why The Prisoner Is Still Worth Watching Today
It’s been almost 60 years since The Prisoner first aired, but it’s still worth watching. I just went back and rewatched it on DVD, and to say that it still holds up is an understatement. Although it was marketed as a traditional action thriller in the vein of McGoohan’s previous series, Danger Man, The Prisoner turned out to be something completely different — something way ahead of its time.
Deep down, the series is a gonzo spy-fi exploration of political paranoia. In the late ‘60s, the post-war euphoria was starting to wear off and the people were starting to lose trust in their elected representatives. The Prisoner used a bunch of surreal, Kafkaesque allegories to reflect the flagrant corruption of the government and the frustrating powerlessness of the people. Those themes and allegories have only gotten more relevant as time has gone on. The corruption within government has only gotten more blatant and widespread in the decades since the show aired, so those pointed metaphors still hold true today.
At the time The Prisoner first aired, television wasn’t known for complicated visuals or big special effects. Since everyone’s TV was a tiny, flickery box in the ’60s, most TV producers just used standard coverage with a three-camera setup on a three-walled set. It wasn’t until Steven Spielberg corralled a blockbuster budget for Band of Brothers that TV started to introduce cinematic visuals and mega-scale production values. But The Prisoner was building extravagant sets and monsters, and capturing a cinematic scope and scale, decades before then — and it’s still a joy to watch now.
Whereas it would take months to catch up on an old classic like Gunsmoke or The Muppet Show that ran for hundreds of episodes, The Prisoner had a mercifully short run. The show only lasted for 17 episodes, so it’s a breezy weekend binge. It’s not a huge commitment for such an integral piece of television history.
The Prisoner
- Release Date
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1967 – 1968-00-00
- Network
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ITV1
- Directors
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Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson, Peter Graham Scott
- Writers
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George Markstein, Anthony Skene, Terence Feely, Vincent Tilsley, Ian Rakoff
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Arthur Gross
Control Room Operator