Ed Driscoll triggers some nostalgia for Baby Boomers with a posting on the PJ Lifestyle weblog:

Seen in the context of the typical American TV fare of the mid-1960s . . . Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner had to have seemed especially surreal and challenging to American viewers, particularly given the year it aired, as 1968 was anything but “the Summer of Love.”

The story goes that McGoohan had gotten bored with playing John Drake, his Danger Man/Secret Agent character, and wanted to try something a bit more challenging. He proposed the story idea to Sir Lew Grade of ITC (who produced everything from Captain Scarlet and UFO to The Muppet Show in the 1960s through the late 1970s, usually with an eye towards the American market). According to the all-knowing, occasionally accurate Wikipedia, it was inspired by George Markstein, The Prisoner’s script editor, who would later write Cold War-themed novels and movies, and who had based his notion out from the legends of World War II. As surreal as the show’s setting seemed to be, it might have been rooted in reality.

While most of us have tended until now to regard McGoohan’s series as an expression of Left-wing paranoia, Driscoll sees it differently:

. . . The Prisoner is ultimately a remarkably libertarian show, asking questions about the nature of postwar government itself. You want to wage the Cold War? You want an ever-expanding Leviathan State? You want loyalty oaths from your employees? You want to implement speech codes and political correctness? You want state-run education? You want cameras on every street corner? Be prepared to face the consequences of living in such a Kafkaesque world.

The controversial final episode — confusing, chaotic, anticlimactic — created quite a stir, being a real let-down for some viewers:

[It was] an inedible stew of sophomoric allegory that ruined everything that had gone before. So last night I watched it again to see if it was truly as bad as I remembered, and yes, it was. Interesting concepts, but tritely executed. Even so, I’ll give him [McGoohan] credit for one thing: having spent 13 episodes defending the rights of the individual to be an individual, he turned the idea on its head at the end, and suggested that absolute individuality corrupts absolutely, that it corrupts society. — James Lileks

Driscoll’s article, “Patrick McGoohan, Double-Oh Kafka”, also has a couple of embedded short videos. The entire series can be bought here.