The Village is a strange place. No one has a name, they have a number. Everyone has a job, a house, a vehicle. Everyone is polite, everyone is happy. Just don’t dream. And never try to leave. When a man from the outside (Jim Caviezel) wakes up in the village with all his memories intact  and the stern assertion that he has been kidnapped and dumped in this strange place, he wants answers… and he wants to escape. The leader of the village, “Number Two” (Ian McKellen), wants to keep our hero, christened “Number Six”, there to crack his mind and find his secrets. You see it turns out that Number Six, in the real world, knew some stuff that the powers that be didn’t want him to know. Ooooooo, Spoooky!!

There’s a lot of hate being flung around about this show, but I for one wish to fly against the wind  and say straight off that I quite like it. You see, when I originally saw “The Prisoner” on a rerun in the late 1980′s, I had this whole “What the hell is this?” opinion of it. I wasn’t aware of any cult status or value, and I took it on its own merits. I decided then and there, that this was “seriously weird”.

The vibe it threw off was unlike any other show I’d ever seen, and after viewing it I noticed that since its initial airing in 1967, it was a vibe that had been replicated all over the place after the fact. But this show was, to my mind, the first. This remake/reboot/relaunch/retelling (not sure what the given parlance is for it) threw the exact same vibe at me.

Indeed, I think I like it for the reasons why many people hate it. The casting of Caviezel, which has been negatively commented on by at least one user on IMDB, worked for me. He doesn’t seem quite right, in a place that doesn’t seem quite right, with a group of characters that themselves don’t seem quite right. The pace was slow, and plodding. The location was isolated and freakish. The updated theme of a lack of humanity in a “You’re very welcome” world worked well – it set the vibe up nicely for me.

A large part of the criticism of a show like this is that it is quite obscure.  Shows like “Twin Peaks”, “Wild Palms”, and latterly “Lost” have brought this central “weirdness” into the mainstream, so bizarrely people have expectations of it. Couple that with the fact that we’re so used to the scripted procedural cop/medical shows that something out of left field like this rails against our expectations and we dismiss it. Which is a shame.

As for Ian McKellen – well, its true to say that the show perks up immensely whenever he’s on the screen. He’s electric in his performance, and he goes a long way into selling the  underlying menace of “The Village”. He accomplishes more with a well timed leer, or a languorously breathed word than everyone else in the cast. He’s marvellous, once again.

What didn’t I like? Well – its a truth that this interpretation does drag on a bit. Its in six parts, and without anything approaching a fast moving narrative, it makes you lunge for the kettle more often than not. Also, the treatment of the female characters in the plot is a touch distant. You feel more for the way less prominently placed gay characters in the piece (for there are one or two) than the leading women, but thats just fly picking on my behalf, I fear.

No – I like this redo. You have to think of it as a companion piece to the original, a re-interpretation of the themes and the situations, not as something designed to replace the original. As I watched it, I thought to myself “this is seriously weird”, which is as good a compliment as I think “The Prisoner” can ever get.