The Prisoner Review: A Pretentious Reimagining

A pretentious "reimagining" subtracts from the paranoid classic The Prisoner

McKellen, far left, and Caviezel, reprise a rivalry but with different results.

Every generation gets the sci-fi paranoia it deserves. Or lately, it borrows the paranoia from a previous generation. ABC's V (the highest-rated new show of the fall) is a remake, or in the new parlance, "reimagining," of a camp-classic 1980s miniseries about an alien takeover, which used its lizards-in-human-clothing story as an allegory for the rise of Nazism.

Now AMC is entering the remake--sorry, reimagining--sweepstakes with The Prisoner (begins Nov. 15), a six-hour sprucing up of the 1967 classic that was the granddaddy of TV head trips like Lost. In the original series, creator Patrick McGoohan starred as an agent who...

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