Breaking Bad : Season 2 : Episode 11: “Mandala”

Walt waits for the deal to end all deals.

Walt and Jesse decide to get out of the distribution business and focus on production, which is significantly safer. Events have conspired to (mostly) keep Walt out of the lab and classroom, so this episode contains nothing of note. Check back soon!

You can read more about this episode at AMC, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Elements in the credits

I’m not sure why Michael Slovis wasn’t assigned iodine (I), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), sulfur (S), oxygen (O) or vanadium (V).

News do AniManiaClub de hoje dedica a versões metal (YEAH!) de covers de animesongs (Eizo Sakamoto) e J-Pop (Dr. Metal Factory – banda do Nobuo Yamada)! Além da trilha do jogo de PS2 Okami. Confira clicando aqui. Lembrando que o cadastro do site é fácil e, o melhor, DE GRAÇA!

El pasado viernes procedimos un amigo y yo a hacer un visionado del remake del Prisionero, asi que vamos a comentar la nueva serie.

EL remake fue una miniserie emitida por el canal amc en tres noches consecutivas.

La historia es la de siempre el numero Seis dimite de su puesto de trabajo y poco tiempo después se encuentra retenido en un extraño sitio conocido como, la Villa. Donde el numero Dos manda y el resto de la gente no sabe del mundo exterior. Por lo tanto Seis planea escapar del lugar.

Y eso es todo lo que hay en común con la anterior serie. En esta se explica el trabajo de Seis, su nombre, que es la villa y demás cosas.

SI obviamos todo eso es una excelente serie de ciencia ficción que toca temas como el subconsciente colectivo y la vigilancia a las personas.

También la serie tiene una final cerrado y una explicación mas que correcta de todo que nos evitan molestas secuelas.

Ademas el numero Dos es un factor muy importante de la serie en algunos episodios mas que el numero Seis.

Hay un par de guiños a la serie antigua y son que el numero 93 lleva el viejo traje de la serie y que en la tasca local esta colgada la bicicleta antigua símbolo de la antigua serie.

Numero 93, homenaje a Patrick McGoohan

Siempre y cuando no se la compare con su predecesora que para mi es una obra maestra es un buen producto y de un rápido visionado.

Nota: 7

Be seeing you!

AMC’s The Prisoner and Transmedia Paticipation

November 21st, 2009

In this week’s review of AMC’s remake of The Prisoner, I wrote at length about what I saw as a failure of the show’s narrative: in my eyes, the series struggled due to a lack of information that resulted in no emotional connection with the characters and, as a result, no real connection to the story. I resisted the argument that the series’ sense of mystery, and its complex thematic conclusion, justify this structure, and friend of the blog David J. Loehr brought up a great example to support my point:

It makes me think of Hitchcock’s example of the “bomb under the table” idea, that you can show ten minutes of two men having the most boring lunchtime conversation ever and BOOM, their table blows up. That’s a cheap thrill at the end of ten boring minutes. Or you could show the bomb under the table, then continue the exact same scene, boring conversation and all, except now it’s fraught with tension as you wait for the bomb to go off. The sixth episode is the bomb, at least in this example if not in modern lingo.

However, based on conversations I had with some of the always great posters at NeoGAF and today’s Futures of Entertainment 4 panel on Producing Transmedia Experiences: Participation and Play, I’m starting to understand why some have argued that the series wass actually a success. It seems that those who enjoyed the miniseries are those who so inherently bought into the sense of mystery and intrigue (inspired both by the density of this miniseries and the decades of debate over the meaning of the original series) to the point where they began to see narrative gaps as clues, and inconsistencies as paradoxes meant to be seen as part of the broader narrative.

I would argue this was not by design, and that these viewers are taking poor execution and turning it into a game that the writers and directors didn’t actually create. They have effectively “gamed” the miniseries, taking a trend that is popular within serial dramas like Lost and applying it regardless of whether it is actually part of an intended transmedia experience.

It’s a behaviour that indicates television has become an environment of “game” (by providing a clear sense of how audience can participate in the construction of narrative) or be “gamed,” and that AMC missed an opportunity to improve the response and increase the impact of the miniseries by not actively pursuing this avenue.

Not only did The Prisoner create no direct avenues for transmedia storytelling, but it actually works against them in two different ways. The first is the way the miniseries was scheduled, in effect trying to avoid this type of response. By airing the six-hour miniseries over three nights, which by all accounts was not always intended and likely the result of quality concerns, they put a time constraint on the amount of time that viewers can spend asking questions and constructing their own theories. While a large percentage of the response to complex serialized dramas takes place immediately after it airs, a lot of discussion of theories and ideas takes place in the days that follow. The chosen schedule limited analysis of the miniseries to the whole, which still spurs discussion but doesn’t allow for the sort of contextual analysis that this sort of dense and complex narrative often inspires – if they had wanted to highlight this aspect, they would have spread the miniseries out over six weeks.

The second is that the miniseries’ writer, Bill Gallagher, indicated in an interview with Jace Lacob that, well, the process of creating the miniseries was anything but scientific:

Those are things that I wanted to address episodically. I like to start small. I wanted to write a story about the family for Six so rather than immediately setting a path for myself for some great mechanical, thematic approach, I just gave him a brother. So I start small and I go looking for where this takes me and then within the story of a man and his brother—is it my brother? Is it not my brother?—I then go looking for the things I like. They might interest you or they might interest my neighbor or be of interest to anyone who watches it and then through that… That’s my approach to universality.

In other words, rather than creating a larger universe and being selective about what is shown (thus creating the negative space that viewers will in with their own ideas before things are revealed in the finale), Gallagher chose to simply start small and eventually figure out where the story was going to go from there. This, without question, still creates a sense of mystery and an opportunity for the audience (who can relate to the theme of family) to construct their own story. However, what Gallagher terms as universality is the idea that everyone can make their own story, rather than suggesting that viewers can work to construct/deconstruct the story being presented. Gallagher wasn’t laying hints that would eventually come together to form a larger theme so much as he was dabbling with large themes and populating them with smaller stories that only hinted at the most interesting parts of the world.

As a result of both the scheduling and the writing process, I believe it says more about the expectations amongst genre viewers than about the miniseries itself that this sort of transmedia play (it all being a game for the audience to play) was taken as the narrative by some viewers. After I posted some of my own thoughts on the series on NeoGAF, user Jocchan posted this response (emphasis mine):

You seem to want the whole point of the Village to have been clear from the beginning, but this would have actually made the series completely worthless: it’s the fact we have no idea what’s going on that makes it interesting, and subtle hints to what’s actually happening are thrown everywhere, throughout the whole show, to make you try and figure it out on your own.

What’s interesting about this response is that I see the point: if I went into this miniseries believing that it was all a game, and that the only narrative being offered was a collection of subtle hints and abstract ideas, I think I would have enjoyed it as well. However, I think it also indicates (for me) the limitations of transmedia play as the inherent purpose of a television narrative. A show like Lost involves a great deal of transmedia storytelling told through Alternate Reality Games and online webisodes and a number of other media, but it is also at its heart a story about characters and their struggle to adapt to the insanity of the island and time travel and the rest of the show’s mythology. Where The Prisoner became problematic for me is that it had no such concrete narrative: outside of the transmedia game that viewers created from the disparate elements of the miniseries, there’s nothing for it to fall back on (and is, to some degree, completely worthless).

What’s frustrating, of course, is that the Prisoner legacy of intense debate over its meaning is crying out for some sort of transmedia storytelling, and I think if the end product had been a bit more well-executed AMC might have been willing to spend the time and money to put together some form of ARG or online component for the miniseries that could have started and even encouraged this sort of behaviour. As it was, though, AMC almost buried the miniseries, doing very little online promotion ahead of its debut and burning it off as quickly as they did. What’s interesting is that I think the miniseries would have been better received on the whole if they had worked to create a transmedia narrative that could purposefully overcome some of its traditional narrative shortcomings, but those shortcomings seem to have convinced AMC that the miniseries needed to be cast aside as quickly as possible.

Despite being scheduled and written in a way that fails to give audiences a clear way to participate in its narrative, AMC’s remake of The Prisoner managed to inspire transmedia storytelling simply by nature of its genre, the tradition of the franchise, and the growing expectation of these narratives within serialized television. It should serve as a lesson of sorts for producers of this type of serialized genre content: this audience is out there and eager to play this game, so give them the tools to do it (while also, you know, constructing a decent narrative at the same time).

Cultural Observations

• The discussion on the #FoE4 hashtag this afternoon also veered into some more familiar territory for me, as there was extensive discussion of Joss Whedon (including the Dollhouse cancellation). I’ve written a lot on that subject in the past, including what I saw as his resistance to an entirely online business model, so I don’t really have anything new to add to that discussion.
• I’ll probably put something together tomorrow overall, but in short I’ll admit that this whole remote attendance through Twitter was really frakkin’ awesome, so thanks to everyone liveblogging/tweeting/participating/etc.

New Delhi, Nov. 20: The Karnataka Cabinet minister and powerful BJP leader, Mr Gali Janardhan Reddy, has come in for severe criticism by the Supreme Court-appointed central empowerment committee for his Obulapuram Mining Company (OMC) indulging in illegal mining by encroaching upon reserved forests.

Also criticising the Andhra Pradesh government for an alleged “cover-up” of the “illegal” mining by Obulapuram Mining Company, the committee recommended demarcation of the boundaries of the six mining leases, including three belonging to the Reddy brothers.

The committee submitted its report to the Supreme Court on Friday.

The committee, in a strongly worded 18-page report, said, “The Obulapuram Mining Company has encroached in mineral rich areas outside their mining leases and is carrying out large-scale illegal mining in unallotted reserved forest areas.”

“Their (government departments) effort appears to have been to cover up the illegal mining done by Obulapuram Mining Company in the unallotted forest areas outside the approved mining leases. This is not simply acceptable and vitiates the process of fixation of mining boundaries by Andhra Pradesh,” the report went on to state.

The report submitted to the Supreme Court on Friday by the panel for consideration by a special forest bench, has also listed Bellary Iron Ore Private Limited (BIOP), Y.M. and Son and Anantapur Mining Corporation (AMC) apart from the three mining fields of the Reddy brothers, which have to be demarcated.

The panel accused the company of “destroying the boundary pillars” and that it “encroached on the forest land located between the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka”.

A report submitted by the committee also stated that OMC has a business partnership with the son of the then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh.

The committee has recommended that the fresh demarcation of the mining areas be done in a “time-bound” manner by a team comprising senior representatives of the Survey of India, ministry of environment and forests, Andhra Pradesh forest department and revenue department as per the “survey and land records”.

“The team should also demarcate, identify and determine the area falling outside the approved mining leases and wherein illegal mining operations have been carried out,” it said.

The committee has disapproved the stand of the AP government that OMC was not involved in any illegal mining in the forest areas outside its mining lease.

The stand of the AP government “suffers from serious defects (on five counts listed in the report) and inconsistencies and is not at all in conformity with the approved mining,” the report said.

While recommending suspension of mining activities in the area in question, the committee said the boundaries of mining leases determined by the AP government were “inconsistent and different” in terms of areas of mining lease, in shape, in length and location.

Mining could be permitted only after fresh demarcation in the approved areas, the committee recommended while asking the top court to “impose exemplary costs equivalent to the normative market value of the iron ore extracted from the areas outside the approved mining lease”.

In Hyderabad, reacting to the observations of the Supreme Court panel, the Chief Minister, Mr K. Rosaiah, said, “Whatever the Supreme Court decides on the issue, my government will implement them in letter and spirit.”

Today there are many instances where people take things that happen on the Internet, radio or television a little bit too far, and it starts to effect life in “the real world”. I’m told it is this magical place where people interact on a human level, completely devoid of technology. Hmm, if only.

One such example involves something I have already blogged a little bit too much about, Tumblr. I only bring it up again because yesterday, someone proposed, via Tumblr. Yes, PROPOSED. Their proposal was posted in banner form above the Tumblr log-in where every user could see it. I snapped a photo for your viewing pleasure.

There were many, many posts about this on Tumblr after it happened. And just as many people found it adorable as found it atrocious. Propose over the Internet? What kind of memory of the proposal does that leave you with? How will you describe it to your Grandkids? They probably won’t even know what a Tumblr is. And I must say, I agree. While I give this dude points for being creative, it is a little creepy to propose over the Internet.

Secondly, I wanted to discuss an article I found in The New York Times the other day about the advertising company McCann Erickson. This real-life company has been name dropped on the hit AMC show Mad Men and, SPOILER ALERT: in the season finale last week, the fictional advertising company in the show, Sterling Cooper, is revealed to have been bought out by McCann, against the will of Sterling Cooper’s employees. And thus, for this week only, McCann’s website features an intro with the show’s characters talking about the merger and then is concluded with a banner reading “Welcome, Sterling Cooper.” Check it out now, it is only up on the site for a week!

I find this kind of integration of television to a real world company a bit more understandable than the Internet proposal, almost cute and kitschy in a way, as if to say, “Yes, we can have a good time and poke a little fun at ourselves and the TV show we have been mentioned on,” but it still doesn’t completely fit this serious advertiser’s model. What about clients who don’t watch the show and see it? Won’t this just seem a bit out of place? Does this kind of media placement mean we should all be paying a lot more attention to hit TV so we can feel more in the loop, more than we already do, when even advertising company conglomerates are using it regularly? Hmm.

Breaking Bad : Season 2 : Episode 10: “Over”

Walt investigates the water heater.

With a little down-time, Walt embarks on some home improvement and Worst Role Model projects. In this post, I’ll be talking about safety matches.

You can read more about this episode at AMC, IMDb and the A.V. Club.

Random thoughts

When Walt is extolling the virtues of the new water heater to Walt Jr, he says that it’s “117,000 BTUs.” The British thermal unit is an older unit of energy that has now been effectively replaced by the joule.

When Walt was walking away from the would-be-meth-cooker’s abandoned equipment, I was certain that he’d mutter “amateur” under his breath.

Phosphorous in matches

Our uninformed cooks are buying matches for a source of red phosphorous, which is required in the red, white and blue process to convert (pseudo)ephedrine to methamphetamine. Walt points out that they need the striker strips rather than the match heads – “strike-anywhere” matches do contain phosphorous, but the safety matches that are more or less ubiquitous these days do not. The dangerous components are segregated into the strips and heads, which means that matches cannot ignite by accident (e.g. on cowboy stubble).

Matches are (intentionally) ignited through friction – dragging the head against a rough surface generates enough heat to convert some red phosphorous (in the striker strip) into highly reactive white phosphorous, which then ignites upon contact with the air. This additional heat is enough to decompose an oxidising agent in the match head (usually potassium chlorate), releasing oxygen. The oxygen-rich atmosphere around the match head plus the heat from the white phosphorous are enough to ignite the main component (sulfur), which burns for long enough to set the wooden matchstick alight. The characteristic smell of a burning match is caused by sulfur dioxide, with perhaps a dash of carbon (soot) and phosphorous pentoxide.

Elements in the credits

I’m not sure why Michael Slovis wasn’t assigned iodine (I), carbon (C), hydrogen (H), sulfur (S), oxygen (O) or vanadium (V).

A miniseries shown on AMC, starring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. Yes, Jesus and Magneto(or Gandalf). It’s a remake of an older version which I can’t compare because I haven’t seen it. The structure is sort’ve of Lost-ish with flashbacks from one reality to another, but The Prisoner is more dreamy and trance-like. I like the concept of the film which begins with a man who finds himself in a world where only a small village in a desert exists. His main purpose in the story is to figure out how to escape. But I think too much emphasis is put on the culmination of the ah-ha realization at the end without helping us enjoy the ride there.

Review: AMC’s The Prisoner

November 18th, 2009

“There’s something thrilling about honesty.”

There’s a moment in the final hour of AMC’s remake of The Prisoner where I started to realize where its real problem lies. This is not to say that I haven’t been realizing the show’s problems from the word go, as the first five hours of the show were highly problematic, but when Ian McKellen’s 2 utters the above line I realized that this is where the intentions of the miniseries went awry.

There are problems with the thematic content of this miniseries, but the real problem is how the writer chose to structure this story in order to create a sense of mystery that was ultimately more vague than it was exciting. In the eyes of the writers, the climax of this story is when the story becomes clear to the audience, and the purpose of the rest of the miniseries is to effectively buy time and confuse us until we’re so desperate for clarity that when we receive it we give ourselves over to the truth. And, to some degree, the strategy worked: the final hour was, in fact, the best of this miniseries primarily because it was finally revealing and engaging with the larger thematic issues being discussed.

However, the problem with this strategy is that the cloudiness of the first four and a half hours of the miniseries not only made us hunger for thrills but also destroyed any sense of thematic consistency and, as a result, destroyed audience interest. While the theme presented at the end of the miniseries is actually compelling, it was so wholly absent for the first four hours (in particular) that it ends up depending entirely on the audience’s willingness to slog through an abstract and experimental four hours where the writer keeps adding new elements to the series when it’s in some way convenient for them as opposed to when it feels earned or natural.

While the miniseries eventually creates a compelling image of modern society, it’s an image that does little to make the first hour hours any better, and in some ways makes them even more irrelevant. It results in a miniseries that is the absolute worst sort of failure, where an intriguing idea and a couple of strong performances are executed in such a way to rob them of any potential to move their intended audience.

The miniseries is the story of Summakor, a company led by a man named Curtis who uses his wife’s biochemistry research on the unconscious to develop a simulated utopia of the mind wherein individuals could travel to an ideal society and become “fixed” for their present lives. The utopia, controlled by his wife’s mind, is run by Curtis’ own counterpart within the simulation of sorts, and is supplied with potential patients by the surveillance research completed by Michael, who after trying to resign from the company is thrown into the simulation himself. It is that moment, when Michael (now as 6) finds himself in the middle of the desert with no idea of how he got there, that begins this miniseries, and this is precisely the problem.

See, 6 isn’t actually interesting. Part of the blame lies on Jim Caviezel, who gives a lifeless performance when he’s asked to speak softly and an outright awkward one when he’s forced to raise his voice. However, much of the blame comes from the fact that the character has no life to him, lacking both a sense of humour and a thought that is in any way unrelated to the Village and his current predicament. The miniseries eventually has him perform a number of odd jobs, each more mundane than the next, and because the character has no nuances or subtleties it’s as if they were unable to get the real actor and instead used a stand-in so that they could film what was happening around them.

The script gives us no sense of why Michael/6 does anything he does other than when he blankly exposits it or, even more problematically, when another character (415, 313, or 2) spells it out for us. There are points in the miniseries where 6 will randomly pop up into a scene to interrogate 313, or question 1112, and I’m left wondering what drove him to make this speech. The answer is never clear, and the editing of the miniseries is such that things just move from one beat to the next without ever showing us how, or more importantly why, certain things are taking place in the way that they are.

Now, I understand the reluctance to reveal details of the plot up front: the show is trying to sell itself on mystery, so having 6 arrive confused and disoriented and to make the Village particularly amorphous and challenging makes perfect sense. However, if this is the case, we need to want to watch the show’s protagonist operate in this environment, and the miniseries fails to make the character the least bit compelling. It slowly parcels out any information that could possibly make his character interesting by turning it into a mystery of its own, the scenes with Lucy in New York designed to pique our interest in the plot rather than actually create interest in this character. I understand that 6 isn’t able to know everything about Michael’s life, or it would defeat the purpose of the entire exercise, but if we had been shown more of his past and given a better sense of his character we might have been able to better understand his character’s motives even if he isn’t quite sure what’s going on.

And I’m not even convinced that the plot should have remained a secret. If the purpose of the miniseries was to make us consider the types of themes that the finale of sorts brought to the surface, I don’t know why those themes couldn’t have been introduced first before then turning this into a character study of Michael, Curtis, Lucy, Sarah, and everyone else. I understand that mystery was a key element of the original series, but this theme didn’t feel as if it really needed mystery to work, and I probably would have found the episodes they delivered far more compelling if I understood what was going on. The story of a husband whose wife has become trapped inside her own mind, unable to enjoy the child she created in that mind that she could never have in real life, would have been just as compelling if we weren’t forced into the position of 1112, unaware of the whole story. By forcing us to know as much about the plot as its two most “out of the loop” characters, it creates mystery where it should be creating dramatic interest, and has bored us into submission by the time it decides it wants to be interesting.

A lot of this does have to do with the fact that the miniseries format seems to have been horribly misused in this instance, especially around the middle of the series. The freedom of a normal series structure is that you have time to investigate various different elements of a story, allowing more time for the viewer to become accustomed to an environment or to a set of characters. This can lead to a slower pace, certainly, but it can also really delve into the world the writers have created. This so-called utopia had a lot of elements taken for granted, such as the question of religion (which was present but non-denominational), or the question of governance, and as such there was a chance for them to slow down for a moment and allow 6 to stop rushing from one point to another and actually experience the world in a way that allows us, as an audience to understand it further.

What was so fascinating about this miniseries is that it actually at points started to do this, and yet refused to slow down in order to make it a successful strategy. It’s as if they decided that, instead of doing a full series, they would simply have a few episodes of a traditional series but refuse to have 6 actually slow down to experience any of it. It resulted in an absolutely bizarre pacing struggle, where 6 never stopped moving and yet what we was moving to was neither as exciting as one expects in a short-form miniseries nor as thorough as one expects in a more traditional series structure. Stories like 6 teaching at a school, or working as an undercover, or discovering a lost family, or being placed into an arranged marriage, were the types of stories that might have been interesting if there was ever a sense that they weren’t just a transitional piece of misdirection. And because of the miniseries structure, Michael never stopped to ask why any one particular event was happening, because that would have slowed things down too much and limited the impact of the big picture, which remained a broad question of “Why am I here?” that rarely changed as each episode passed.

It was only when things started to come together in the end that the miniseries started to be more successful, as the New York and the Village began to connect with one another in a legitimately intriguing way. By the time we got to “Checkmate,” I was confused less about what was going on (which I’d argue is counter productive) and more about what was going to happen (which, to me, is the perfect source of tension). When the two worlds collided through more than just a boring conversation between Michael and Lucy in his own memory, the show was finally telling us something about its key themes. Summakor went from some sort of faceless corporation to a clear part of our narrative, and 313 went from an undefined female love interest to a legitimately tragic character whose pain is now comprehensible (and present at all, really). When all of that happens, the story suddenly becomes really interesting, and I’m guessing that if you watched the finale first, the first five hours of the miniseries would probably be a whole lot more interesting – if honesty is so thrilling, why not open with it so that the boring introduction is the least bit compelling?

There were some interesting elements to be salvaged here. I thought Ian McKellen was great throughout, even if the character of 2 became problematically expository at various points within the narrative, and Curtis’ story is probably the most complete story provided to any of the characters (perhaps helped by the fact that it becomes clear the quickest). And I liked the idea that the leader was 2, as opposed to 1, because the idea of being whole (of being one soul) was unattainable to those who have essentially been split into two in order for them to improve their lives. And the idea of the Dreamers, people who aren’t as easily assimilated into this new utopia, working as a sort of resistance to the sense of order has some real potential to it. I think there’s a really intriguing miniseries to be told about that environment, one which could deal with the same themes that writer Bill Gallagher wants to deal with here, but this just wasn’t it in any way.

Some broad stories like this suffer from a weak ending, but I thought this one was compelling: Michael, who is responsible for this program starting as a result of his Big Brother-like observations within Summakor, is forced to choose between destroying the Utopia or attempting to take over and fix what Curtis was unable to sustain before him. In the end, he chooses the latter because of what he sees Sarah turning into, and when he sees that 147’s real life counterpart is closer to getting to see his daughter as a result of the process being undertaken, and he chooses to believe that helping people (even when they don’t ask for it, as is implied) is worthwhile. It may be a prison, but like any prison system it’s one that people believe can reform people, and that some believe can be changed to truly be a utopia of sorts. And so Michael sacrifices himself as Curtis once did, and 313 gives up her life in the village to serve as the new host, drugged into a state of unknowing.

But a satisfying ending doesn’t make the rest of the miniseries any more interesting, except from the perspective of analyzing the ending more carefully in the context of the rest of the story. However, while Daniel Fienberg has written an extensive analysis that makes the story seem really compelling, I wanted the show to be that compelling. If these kinds of ideas are so interesting, then why weren’t they present throughout the miniseries in a way that went beyond a scattered collection of disconnected and “weird” story beats? While Daniel’s right to point out that you could write extensive essays on the theme of the miniseries, you could also (heck, I sort of just did) write extensive essays about how poorly it organizes itself to actually capture those themes in an entertaining piece of television.

And while we do give points for intention, when the execution is this muddled and confused I can’t really suggest that any but the most morbidly curious seek out this miniseries for entertainment purposes. If this had been executed, it could have been another notch in AMC’s belt – as it turned out, it’s an intriguing oddity that’s more failure than success and more idea than execution.

Cultural Observations

• Jace over at Televisionary has an interview with the writer, Bill Gallagher, which reveals both that he “wrote small” for the miniseries (which makes about as much sense as it sounds) and that he never intended for the glass towers seen by the dreamers to in any way represent the World Trade Centre. The first I can sort of understand, even if it does explain a number of the show’s problems, but the latter baffles my mind: it’s one thing not to see the connections with really broad philosophical constructs (there’s some of Plato’s “The Cave” in here, as Jace points out), but it’s another to miss something so culturally relevant to the show’s New York setting.
• Considering that the actress who played 313 looked a bit like January Jones, there were a few times where I imagined the cast of Man Men (Jon Hamm, Jones, Elisabeth Moss, etc.) replacing the non-McKellen cast members, and I have to tell you that it became a far more interesting show as a result.
• That being said, I did think that the cast was solid other than Caviezel, especially Lennie James and young Jamie Campbell Bower (who is playing Weymar Royce in the Game of Thrones pilot for HBO).
• A legitimate question: I have to wonder if AMC always intended to air the miniseries over three nights. The episodes are clearly distinct from each other, which meant that they could have easily spread it out over six nights (Sunday-Friday) or over six weeks like a traditional series. I have to wonder if the quality of the opening episodes might have made this decision for them, or if they felt there was some other reason to air two hours a night during an extremely busy sweeps period.

I’ve got a pretty embarrassing confession to make: I was pretty damn excited when AMC started airing commercials of The Prisoner remake. I told everyone within earshot about it. “Man, are you going to be watching Prisoner?” I’d say. “It looks totally sweet! Watch it watch it watch it!” I planned my weekend around watching it, even flipping channels from a riveting Patriots-Colts match-up on Sunday Night Football. The special effects looked slick, and changing the setting from an island to a desert not only looked scenic, but also opened up the possibility of new twists to the original. Plus it starred Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. You heard that right: Ian Friggin’ McKellen. The man who made Gandalf the Grey a believable parable for the Civil Rights Movement. There’s no WAY this was anything but must see TV!

And I’m not even that huge of a Prisoner fan. I’d only seen three episodes beforehand: “Arrival,” “The Chimes of Big Ben”, and the ridiculously trippy finale “Fall Out.” Plus I was indoctrinated by all “The Prisoner” pop culture references, mainly the infamous Simpsons episode where Homer ends up on … The Island. (“Why a balloon?” “Shut up! That’s why!”) There’s so much potential in a remake: perhaps we could get new, fresh resolutions to a lot of the unanswered questions in the original!

So I watched the remake and … well.. in the words of MST3K’s The Mads: “Sandstorm. Saaaaaannnnndddstoooorrrmmmm. Deeeeeep Hurrrttttiiinnnggg.”

In the first two episodes, you get maybe 5 minutes of awesomeness (any appearance of Rover and most of Ian McKellan’s scenes) and 120 minutes of moping, “surreal” imagery that really wasn’t all that weird, and uninteresting secondary characters. I tried to like this remake. By God, did I ever try. Even after my initial disappointment, I tuned in to the conclusion on Wednesday, just to see how what the AMC series would tie it all together. I fell asleep only about 10 minutes in. Does Jim Caviezel dance to “Dem Bones” while robed judges in half-black, half-white masks cheer on? I have no idea. The Wikipedia plot summary doesn’t give me much hope, though, because the secret behind The Village sounds LAME AS ALL HELL.

At the same time, AMC launched a webcomic — I’m sorry, “online graphic novel” — to expand on The Prisoner mythos. It can be found here at the AMC site. Now, given that I hated, hated, HATED AMC’s The Prisoner, you’ve got to ask yourself: why in the world would I ever even bother to read The Prisoner webcomic? Well, I was partly driven by due dilligence and partly driven by morbid curiosity. I also held a small, irrational glimmer of hope, too, that there might be a chance The Prisoner webcomic could surpass the TV show as the standard bearer for the modern day Prisoner canon.

Let me present you the following Batman-based analogy (which, for the record, is the best kind of analogy). Remember when Batman: The Animated Series came out? It went on the air at the same time Batman Returns hit theaters, a movie that some movie buffs retroactive claim as the artistic highpoint of the Burton/Schumacher era but was universally reviled when it debuted. So while fans were disappointed movie-wise, they could at least forgive Batman Returns because it helped spawn The Animated Series, which is pretty much THE definitive Batman incarnation of our generation.

In the same manner, I’d hoped the webcomic might usurp the mantle of the TV show to become The Prisoner status quo… perhaps leading to an animated series that will no doubt scar the minds of the little kiddies if The Misadventures of Flapjack hadn’t done that already.

Thus far, two issues out of the ten issue run of The Prisoner Online Graphic Novel have been released. The webcomic was created by Zombie Dog Productions. It boasts a fairly large staff: M. Scott Veach handles writing. Mitchell Breitweiser and Cliff Richards handle the art. Plus, there’s also a letterer, an editor, an assistant writer, two animators, and two line producers. Whew!

Sadly, while The Prisoner webcomic isn’t quite as soul-crushing as the new TV series, it’s still about as exciting as watching a grass grow.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. The Prisoner is one of the very few webcomics that decide to integrate motion. I have no complaints from a technical standpoint. In select scenes you can watch glass shatter or follow the spinning rotor blades of a ceiling fan. Click on the “Next” button, and the site glides to the page rather than the standard refresh screen. All told, it’s pretty cool. Clicking on a link to an issue brings up a loading screen (accompanied by an animated silhouette of The Village old-timey bicycle — coooool) which queues the entire 11 to 15 page comic at one time. Thus, we’re spared the terrible page-to-page lag times that define Zuda offerings.

At least Zombie Dog Productions is trying. Most comics paired with big media events feel barely more than promotional fliers. It looks like Team Zombie Dog is at least attempting to write a compelling supplemental story. Why slate 10 issues for a mini-series that was over in 3 days otherwise?

Unfortunately, The Prisoner Online Graphic Novel reads like a Prisoner fanfic… even moreso than the TV show. I mean, you follow a gal who’s called Number 18. That is totes a Mary Sue fanfic name! She’s on the run for no apparent reasons, and then ends up in The Village for equally vague purposes. We, the readers, don’t care, because Number 18 is just as much a card-board cutout of a character as TV’s new Number 6.

The comic also takes place in the AMC vision where *spoiler alert!* our world and The Village exist in separate realities. (It just now occurs to me why they waited until the end of The Prisoner miniseries to release Part Two of the online graphic novel.) While it’s not as confusing as Caviezel’s crazy scene transitions, it’s still just not that compelling of a concept. If you were going to go that direction, why not create a world that’s completely ridiculous and surreal rather than something that looks like your garden-variety suburb plopped in the middle of the Sahara? That’s how The Maxx did it, what with their Izses and floating whales and jungle girls and what not. And everyone LOVES The Maxx.

Also, like the remade TV show, the comic lacks any sense of humor. It’s deadly earnest, deadly serious … and deadly dull. For all it’s high concept, the original did, once in a while, have a sense of humor. Sure, at no point does Number Six go: “Is that really a goddamn balloon from the London Meteorological Society you’re using as a security device? Really?” But make no mistake, there are light-hearted scenes. Like that scene where Number Six gets so fed up with the radio that he stuffs it in his refrigerator. Or that memorable moment where Six asks for a larger map, and the shopkeeper delivers a larger map covering the exact same area.

You see? Just because you’re drugged and stuck on a pleasant island with a sinister undercurrent doesn’t mean you can’t crack a joke once in a while! It’s a freshman mistake storyteller tend to forget. All current sci-fi shows want to be Lost. But all the storytellers fall for a freshman mistake: they remember the overpowering air of mystery, but they forget that Hurley broke out the golf clubs when everyone got too serious.

So, thus far, The Prisoner Online Graphic Novel doesn’t quite deepen the world of The Village. Rather, it plunges you into the exact same very boring and very unpleasant world of the AMC TV show. Hooray.

The comic doesn’t work on my iPod Touch, by the way. For some reason, Apple doesn’t allow you to download Macromedia Flash. In other news, The Prisoner Online Graphic Novel is sponsored by the Palm Pre. (For those wondering: Rover doesn’t appear in the comic yet, but the Palm Pre does.) So … does this comic actually work on the Palm Pre? If it does, is this some sort guerrilla marketing with an insidious hidden meaning?

Number Two: “So, my dear Apple user. It seems you cannot read comics using your puny Safari browser. You have given up your right to be an individual. To The Village with you!”

Masked judges (representing iPod users): “I! I! I! I! I!”

Steve Jobs (dancing): “Dem bones dem bones dem… dry bones!”

{Number Two, played by the creepy Palm Pre lady, pulls out a tommy gun an massacres everyone to the tune of “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles}

Aw, hell. I think I like my The Prisoner fanfic much, much better.

Rating:

Patrick McGoohan’s disapproving glare

AMC just finished the three-night special The Prisoner. The series follows Jim Caviezel’s Number Six as he tries to escape “The Village,” an odd little town in the middle of the desert. The Village is populated by people named with numbers who believe the Village is all that there is to the world. Number Two (played by Sir Ian Mckellen) oversees the Village and acts as Number Six’s principle antagonist in escaping back to the real world.

This will spoil the ending, as I’m attempting to summarize and interpret it right after the cut. For full disclosure, I never saw the original British series, so all I know is what Wikipedia tells me. I make no comparisons to it anyway, so you don’t need to have seen it either to read my post. If anyone has insight from the original series that sheds light on the new one, feel free to comment.

In the final episode, Number Six and Number Two’s real-world selves (Michael and Mr. Curtis respectively) meet. Mr. Curtis discusses the nature and purpose of the Village. Essentially, Mrs. Curtis is a biochemist who discovered access to a new layer of consciousness. Helen uses Summakor to select people with life problems – from hating the world to drug addictions to being mentally unstable and so on – and somehow bring a form of their consciousnesses into this new layer.

This layer is the Village, letting people live lives away from their real-world problems so they can learn to be happy and take that feeling back with them to the real world. In its simplest form, the Village is therapy through role play.

Village Program Metaphor

Prior to the premier of The Prisoner, AMC aired the entire Matrix trilogy. I had a discussion with a Facebook friend about this being AMC hinting at the Village being a virtual reality world the inhabitants are plugged into. I objected at the thought because I felt it would be too obvious and clichéd. Luckily that is not the case, but really, it’s not that far off.

Let’s look at the Village like this: Two/Curtis’ wife is a dreamer who maintains the Village together within her mind. She is the server in which the Village program exists. Two and his lackeys are system moderators and lesser moderators respectively. The people within the Village who are consciousnesses of real-world people, they are avatars using numbers as usernames.

Following this line of thinking actually helps explain aspects of the series. For instance, undercover agents tracking down dreamers in the third episode “Anvil.” These rogue dreamers bring in aspects of the real world into the Village, like 313 drawing the Statue of Liberty. Bringing in the real world breaks the suspense of disbelief in the therapeutic role playing within the Village. Going back into system terminology, rogue dreamers bring in outside malware to the Village programming, keeping it from functioning at its optimal capability.

But how is outside information into the Village malware? Look at Six and Three-One-Three. His influence on her about an outside world causes her to have more and more flashes of the real world. Prior, she was doing well in the Village. As Mr. Curtis says in the real world, Three-One-Three’s real persona Sara was doing well in recovering from her childhood trauma, but then she began to relapse. This is likely due to Six’s influence on her.

Another aspect this explains is the appearance of the sinkholes. They begin to appear after Two/Curtis’ wife Helen awakens the first time. Later, when Eleven-Twelve awakens her, she mentions the holes appear every time she’s awake. Helen must stay in a medicated coma to maintain the Village, while in the real world, she is a vegetable constantly mumbling.

Maintaining the Village seems to take up multiple levels of her consciousness. When Helen, being the server holding the Village, concurrently runs one of her consciousnesses, such as her being awake in the Village, the integrity of the Village weakens. The holes are gaps or glitches in the Village where the server can’t buffer with too many programs running. Kind of difficult to up the RAM in the human mind.

The Ending and Beyond the System Transfer

Eleven-Twelve kills his mother in the Village. A layer of Helen’s consciousness is gone. The Village forms even more holes and begins to fall apart with no stopping it. Why? Because part of the server is damaged and corrupted. It can no longer function with enough capacity to maintain the Village. The solution is to get a new server – a new dreamer – to hold the Village. This is Three-One-Three/Sara.

Obviously Six/Michael objects. Instead of simply taking a level of consciousness for rehabilitation, having her function as the home of the Village leaves her a vegetable in both worlds. However, to save her from her inner torment, he helps her do so. Therefore, storage and operation of the Village transfer from Helen and Mr. Curtis to Sara and Michael respectively.

And so Six/Michael/new Two takes over administration of the Village, while Three-One-Three/Sara takes up maintaining the Village. Six is hopeful that he can make the Village good, that he can make it work. How? Perhaps less stringent moderation that kidnaps Village inhabitants. Maybe instituting some sort of choice, even in a subconscious level ala the Matrix trilogy. Or maybe no substantial change will happen and the Village will keep changing over. Who knows?

“Be Seeing You” 

Synopsis on “The Prisoner” Remake

Six?  Two?  The premise from the original was the man who wakes up in ‘The Village, unaware of how or why he is there.  His last memory is resigning from an organization and now is in a location, where everyone is a number, and he, as “Six,” is constantly faced with intellectual antagonists, duelling with some ease and bravado, providing triumph or tense, purposeful reflection at the end of each episode.  While Six continues to do his best to escape his seen (and unseen) captor, he cannot escape, seemingly caught by a “catch” in the subterfuge or by a huge, white ball, called “Rover.”   Is that the case for the remake?  Yes or no?  Ok, I am not a number! 

This remake of a classic tv series from the late sixties, I feel, was a new deconstruction of some intellectual pursuits, visual similarity in set design, but a huge departure from original cast style, character dynamic, and swims in a plot re-interpretation, comparable to a 21^st century mind cocktail of fear, morality, freedom and chaos, unlike the original.  (If you haven’t seen it, I cannot tell you.  It’s something you may want to check out for youself.  As to continuing making this “cerebral” libation, it’s like the proverbial Long Island Ice Tea in the remake–some ice (in how the characters respond at first), an ounce of schizoid-surrealism (throughout), a final dash of ’subconscious’ (clue!), with a Matrix-slice techno blend of reality and mental illness as a garnish, traumatic characters as the last powerful ingredient.  But wait, there’s a chase!  A shot of swirling emotions, two love interests, and little add-ons, such as the “Goinside” underground club that resembles something from a Los Angeles  ‘Erotica festival’.  That’s your new “Prisoner” mini-series.

As a Prisoner purist, I thrived on the mind games and the character reflection of the original.  Thus, this remake, at first taste, caused “One” to have an aneurism, exclaiming, “Sacrilege!”   Ok, not that, but certainly frustrated at losing the kiss…the lack of intellectual diving for each scene, and the enduring flavor…the guaranteed cerebral Pavlov response, which I was anticipating. However, admittedly, there is room for “One” to experience a new, updated maze of imagination, oddity, mind candy and tension taste buds.

This mini-series makes different messages about the “real” world versus the unreal ‘Village’ conflict.  As expected, once I escaped from the determinism of reliving original characters and plot lines, I was greeted by new, varying chimeras in the condensed “Six” episodes. 

What was the same?  Six’s moral dilemmas, struggles for escape, freedom,  remembering his past and out-thinking the characters, and a stillness within characters.  Visually, the land was similar in that it had the original Village look of the houses and other surroundings, yet it reminded me of Silicone Valley or Orange County. 

Veteran Prisoner fans…are you ready for new characters?  The most predominant?  The character “Two” having a bed-ridden wife and a son, Six’ taxi-driving friend, amongst other subtleties.

Notably, these episodes bounced chaotically into multiple emotional themes and an array of concepts, from sexuality to sanity, death and love.  Struggles, though, in this mini-series, appeared more layered than the original, highly magnified and without resolve, in most cases, whereas the original usually had a resolve, for Six, good or bad.

Thus, if hungry for the original characters, let go.  Characters were not parallel, and what they were about.  In the original, it was more outlined as to people’s agendas.  My favorite diversion was the writer going into more love and love interest(s), handled with the “close up lens” focus. 

As a wrap, “The Prisoner,” shown on AMC, in 2 hour bursts for three consecutive days, was a mini-series with glimpses of the original episodes but changed drastically as to plot line and a twist in the conclusion, which I will allow you to find.  I admittedly wanted the remake from start to finish, to remain intact, but in escaping the past series, it was enjoyable and took me to a new ‘world’ in view.  And yes, I missed hearing the song “All you need is love.”

Thanks for reading!  Be seeing you!

If interested in viewing the synopsis of the episodes,  you’ll find the information available at Wikipedia and at AMCTV.com:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_(2009_miniseries)  

 http://www.amctv.com/originals/the-prisoner/

Well the good news is… things aren’t getting any worse. Not that there was much scope for the spec script market to fall any more. Universal and Sony have used up their development budgets for this year, or had it taken away form them The other studios aren’t faring much better. So far this year, the proportion of scripts that have gone out wide and sold, hovers at around 1%. That’s about the same figure during the writers strike. Dire news, but at least it’s honest.

Although the persistent economic storm clouds are gradually starting to  lift, with major companies beginning to recapitalize, things should turn in the new year. Progress is likely to be slow as we still face the possibility of a double dip in the economic recovery. You know things are bad when the top tenpercentaries are selling single single digit numbers of projects. Scripts are still being circulated so that writers can display their wares. Make sure you’re one of them and get as many query letters out there as possible, hopefully even a few reads. We still need to market ourselves and network like crazy.

The screenwriting landscape has changed dramatically since the WGA strike of 2008. Television networks are relying on reality tv shows despite audience drops of around 20%. Reality tv shows can cost less than half that of scripted dramas, so are highly profitable. Networks have learnt to live without us. Where major shows used to hire 10-12 writers, the number has dropped by around 30 -40%. The number of pilots commissioned by the television networks has fallen by a similar amount. The good news is that the best television writing around these days is in cable television. Ratings of scripted cable shows have improved by around 20 -30%. Look at the Emmys, with shows like “Mad Men”, “Breaking Bad”, “Weeds” and “Hung”. Go Showtime, HBO and AMC. You rock!

The feature business is murkier. Producers are finding it tougher to get projects off the ground in light of costs increasing by around 10% per year. Many studio films are unprofitable and are considered advertisements for DVD sales and merchandising, both of which faced decreasing sales in the current economic climate.  Old school mentality dictated that you were only as successful as your last project. This adage no longer holds true. Studios are increasingly hedging their bets with franchises, sequels and comics. The beleaguered MGM studio is likely to be auctioned off shortly. In the absence of many serious buyers, it may not survive, given that it’s library is considered old and unlucrative. The worst case scenario would be one less buyer and one less lion roaring.

It has been argued that in 2009, it was easier to get a $200 million plus project like “Star Trek” greenlit than a $10 million indie. The “specialty” film business, which was once swallowed up by the studios, have still not returned in vogue. Studio balance sheets show that the more you spend on a movie, the more money it earns to justify their budgets. Studios aren’t even sure where to  spend their P & A dollars anymore. Given the declining ratings, traditional television advertising isn’t as effective as it once was. Virals and other internet campaigns are gradually being rolled out as audiences are spending more time on the internet.

However, we need this destruction to allow for new creation. How biblical! Old debt based business models need to altered to suit the new streamlined modern age. Can you believe that shows celebrating their 100th episode are really celebrating when they break even financially? How could that be sustainable? You gotta hand it to “The Simpsons” who are just recently starting to post profits. There’s creative accounting for you.

Still, the world will always need storytellers; that means us. However, the media in which we operate will change. As writers, we need to diversify our outlets. Consider writing for downloadable or streamed radio plays, webisodes, audio books on CD, mobile phone content. Nobody has figured out a viable business model for these formats, but they will in time. Necessity is the mother of invention, so we too must evolve. New foliage will sprout in the burnt out forest and we’ll be there to nurture it.

The show, for those who haven’t seen, is, in a word, spectacular. The writing and acting are fantastic. Season one starts out kind of slow, I think, but somewhere along the line it hooks you in like a great ad.

If you haven’t seen it, I definitely recommend it.

Its name is the Kia Soul, and it was bound to happen. Sooner or later, a car maker would make a really bad mistake in their quest for the ultimate hybrid, sport-utility-car-be everything vehicle. This one was crossed-over one too many times—a cross-dresser crossed with a cross-eyed cousin. Too many breeds in the mix and you get a mutt. And man, is this one fugly.

I saw one on the road for the first time last week and I thought it was my eyes playing tricks on me. Then I saw one again—no mistake. This is one heinously-designed piece of transportation. There are some unique vehicle shapes on the road that have turned heads for the worse from time-to-time, like the Honda Pilot and the Nissan Cube, odd-looking but somehow endearing because of some subtle styling nuance. But the Soul?  Not a chance. The look only a foreigner could love. Let me elaborate.

It starts with the back, the butt, which has these ridiculous vertical tail lights and a ridge-like rim bumper, pointy-sharp like. We recognize this lineage as vaguely familiar:  the AMC Gremlin. Oh, the Gremlin was definitely this car’s loony grandfather, and we know what a paragon of design that monster was. I think you might find it in Disney’s Epcot Center as the Car of the Future.

Then moving to the profile you see the strange meeting of angular back with curvy nose; it makes little design sense. This is a Mad Libs sort of design, like Kia took a bunch of parts and pasted them together, filling in the blanks with hilarious results. From the side you can see how the weird angles of the cabin top contrasted with the windows remind us of one very specific shape:  a hearse—how chic.

And the front, wow. Kia was trying really hard to be car-like, but you can see this has a serious schizophrenia.  Besides having no real character except being related to those exaggerated Dodge noses of late, the front does not match the rear.  An identity crises?  This car has a mullet! In addition, it possesses some bastardized pseudo-retro in it too, a la the PT Cruiser.

Every one in a great while we are granted a look at a vehicle that somehow escaped from the drawing board, the testing, the market analysis and the production quality back check, and onto the road. They are designs of infamy:  the El Camino, almost anything by the aforementioned AMC, the Pontiac Aztek, the Chevy Avalanche.  There are others. They usually do not stick around long, and I sure hope we do not see too many more of Kia baring its Soul.

Enjoy it while it lasts, this freak-of-nature. With so much to choose from, and the economically-challenged domestics smartly paring down their lines to win market share, I doubt too many people will part with their cash to bring this homely home. The Kia Soul is not an ugly duckling to be parked in the garage in the hope it will hit puberty and look good one day. If you bought it, you were Souled because it belongs in Ripley’s.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned by watching Mad Men – Season One, it’s that apparently no one was happy in 1960. The men weren’t happy and didn’t know how to express it because they had to Be Men, and the women weren’t happy because they were expected to be little more than mindless serving women. No one could talk about what they felt or what they really wanted, morality was subjective, and freedom was something you had only if you were a WASP, and even then it was the freedom to ONLY be a WASP and nothing else.

Mad Men, as you doubtless know, tells the story of a group of advertising executives at a New York ad firm in 1960. The men, and they’re almost all men, are kings of their domain, but are starting to sense the early stirrings of a peasant uprising. It’s this – the conflict around the upcoming rise in freedom and equality for gays, women and blacks – that forms the basis of a lot of the most interesting stories in this show.

The acting, directing and cinematography are all suberb. The plots are intelligent and well-written. You’ll even pick up a thing or two about advertising!

I hadn’t seen this program on TV, nor seen any episodes of it. I bought this DVD set purely on the strength of what I’d heard about it. I was not disapointed. It may not be the best TV show of the last ten years (“Battlestar Galactica” wins that prize), but it’s supremely excellent and highly recommended, and, at least at the moment, under $20 on Amazon! So what’s not to like?

Jamie Campbell Bower as Number 11-12 in The Prisoner. Photo copyright of Granada/AMC

Imagine having a life where pretty much everything you want is within easy reach and all you have to do is ask for it. In AMC’s re-imagined version of The Prisoner, Number 11-12 wakes up to that every day as a resident of The Village. The son of Number Two, the overseer of this residential “paradise,” and M2, his idealistic mother, this 17-year-old is among the privileged and is being groomed to one day take over his father’s duties within The Village. It sounds like the perfect situation, maybe not for 11-12, but it was one that actor Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays 11-12, could not wait to jump into.

“There had been rumors of The Prisoner floating about, and then I got a phone call from my agent telling me, ‘I think you should go out for this.’ He’s rarely wrong, so I did,” recalls Bower. “I received four pages of audition sides from one of the episodes, and as I read them something really struck home with me. There was just something quite moving about the material and this idea of family and the connection between 11-12 and his father, Two, played by Ian McKellen.

“So I was very excited about the project to begin with, and it was, I think, a rainy Tuesday afternoon when I went down to London’s South Bank next to the Thames for my audition. Whatever I did must have worked because I received another call telling me that I got the role, which was brilliant.”

11-12 with his father, Number Two (Ian McKellen). Photo copyright of Granada/AMC

While a life of privilege may sound enticing to some, especially a young person, it is rarely all that is cracked up to be. And as typically happens, no one seems to have asked 11-12 what he wants.

“With my character, it’s that classic case of, ‘I don’t want to be the prince any more. I want to be an ordinary person,” says Bower. “But then he also thinks that one day he might inherit The Village, so like most people his age, 11-12 is definitely feeling some angst towards his father. As for his relationship with his mother, M2 [Rachael Blake], it’s very distant. He loves her dearly, but he never sees her. His mother is just this entity in the house they live in, and 11-12 strives to have a much closer bond with her.

“So as you might imagine, 11-12 is quite highly strung and emotionally charged. He also has this feeling that he’s missing something in his life, but he doesn’t know what it is. Acting-wise, maintaining that high level of intensity and emotion wasn’t easy. In fact,there was one particular scene that I did with Vincent Regan [Number 909] that screws up my character in a major way. We shot it over an entire day and I had to be incredibly emotional most of that time. Again, it was tough, but it was also a challenge and one I enjoyed because it really helped me to grow as a person as well as an actor.”

Not a good day in The Village for 11-12. Photo copyright of Granada/AMC

Much to his surprise, a frustrated 11-12’s eyes are opened to an entirely new set of possibilities for his future, thanks to The Village’s newest resident and The Prisoner’s lead character, Number Six (Jim Caviezel). “Six’s arrival throws a bit of a spanner into the works of The Village,” notes Bower. “He comes along and forthrightly and outwardly says, ‘This isn’t all there is’ and 11-12’s reaction to that is, ‘Well, maybe he’s right.’ So his interaction with Six is one of curiosity as well as questioning and trying to understand why it is that this man is saying what he’s saying. And I think 11-12 ends up believing in and trusting Six.”

While their onscreen personas are caught up in the turmoil of what is happening to them, The Prisoner’s cast as well as crew could not have enjoyed their time together more, Bower included. “Everyone involved in this project is incredibly talented and fun,” enthuses the actor. “Working with Ian McKellen is an absolute joy and a pleasure. The same is true of working with young British stars like Hayley Atwell [Lucy/4-15] and Ruth Wilson [Number 313]. We all became good mates and helped each other out, patted one another on the back when we needed it, and laughed at each other when we didn’t need it,” he jokes. “We spent four-and-a-half months together in South Africa. Not many people can say that, apart from those who live there, and we had a really nice time.”

Bower was 14 when he decided that he wanted to become an actor, and four years later made his feature film debut in director Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. “I had just turned 18 and was at boarding school in the English countryside,” he says. “I was sneaking out at five o’clock in the morning through my house master’s backdoor and getting into a car that was waiting for me outside the school gates to take me to set. I’d then return to school around seven at night and go back to bed.

11-12 shares a rare moment with his mother, M2 (Rachael Blake). Photo copyright of Granada/AMC

“I did that for about two weeks and then I made the decision that I should probably just leave school and not bum a free bed off them every night. So that’s what I did, and it was an incredibly terrifying experience for me, being just 18 and working alongside people like Tim Burton as well as Johnny Depp, Alan Rickman and Timothy Spall. It was also a phenomenal opportunity and it gave me such an amazing starting point that I could never have dreamt of, so I was very, very lucky.”

Besides The Prisoner, Bower can also currently be seen as Caius in the latest installment of the hugely successful teenage vampire tale The Twilight Saga: New Moon. “I was in Los Angeles not too long ago and they were casting for New Moon,” says the actor. “My American agent asked me if I would like to audition for it, and I said that I’d kill to audition for it. So I met with [director] Chris Weitz and then I got a call offering me the role of Caius, which I was really excited about.

“Caius, along with Michael Sheen’s character of Ar0, and Marcus,who is played by Chris Heyerdahl, are the leaders of an ancient Italian vampire coven known as the Volturi. We shot in Vancouver and I was there for about three weeks working with actors like Michael, Chris, Dakota Fanning [Jane], Rob Pattinson [Edward Cullen] and Kris Stewart [Bella Swan]. It was a real treasure of a role for me and another great set of actors to work with and learn from.”

Change is in the air when 11-12 crosses paths with Number Six (Jim Caviezel). Photo copyright of Granada/AMC

The actor has a lead role alongside Keira Knightley and Colin Farrell in the upcoming film London Boulevard and has guest-starred in an episode of the new British Fantasy TV series Game of Thrones. Harry Potter fans can also look forward to enjoying Bower’s performance in the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

“I play Gellert Grindelwald, who’s an old friend of Dumbledore’s [Michael Gambon],” he says. “They have this idea that they can create a utopian wizardry world, and then there’s a big fight and something awful happens,” teases the actor.

“So it was another fun project, and ‘fun’ is one of the things about this job that’s important to me. I hope I can continue doing this up until the point that it isn’t fun any more. That’s when people become jaded and become the person that they never wanted to be. I think growing as an actor and a performer is a wonderful thing to behold, and feeling like you’re learning as well. That’s especially important for young actors like myself who have chosen a different path. We haven’t gone to university, but, instead, have decided that acting is what we want to do, and as long as you’re learning while doing it, then I think that’s the main thing that will keep you happy.”

Steve Eramo

The Prisoner concludes tonight, Tuesday, November 17th @ 8 p.m. EST/PST.

As noted above, all photos copyright of Granada TV and AMC, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks!

I thought I’d watch  ‘The Matrix’ trilogy offered on AMC, the channel where "story matters",  without interruption.  For the first time, not missing a thing by turning away from commercials and not getting back in time to pick up the show were it left off, and so I did.
  What a bunch of crap!
My feeling is that slightly more time was allotted to the chopped  without conscience, Matrix footage, than was allotted to normal commercial advertisement, and of the commercial time  given to pecker pills, pumps & suckers, even more commercial time left me subjected to the most ghastly display of academics contribution to ethics, forget common decency.
  Every cheap trick, used to exploit the fearful followers, in every demographic and market, the ads between the moments of footage were mostly flashy, sometimes almost subliminal.  Whatever, ‘the on screen hypes’ for the new big deal, "The Prisoner", are mere psycho-trash.  There was no way to follow the story of The Matrix  but if you didn’t change channels, you were watching the kind of shit our institutes of higher learning are turning out! 
"That’s where the money is."   "Feed the Greed."  "Get a job with a fear machine."
So I came away from the AMC presentation of The Matrix, ‘ Reloaded‘, and ‘Revolutions‘, resenting the continual interference offered by AMC at my expense about some new old show,  ‘The Prisoner’, redone on behalf of ad revenues, only this time less openly, more predatory.
I will not tune into AMC again for anything, and your best can’t change my mind.

O remake da série clássica ‘The Prisoner’ estreou este domingo na AMC e teve ótima audiência. A minissérie atraiu 2.2 milhões de telespectadores durante suas duas primeiras horas.

Para se ter uma idéia da boa audiência, a season finale de ‘Mad Men’ atraiu 2.3 milhões de telespectadores.

O show não só ganha moral logo em sua estreia, mas ajuda o AMC a continuar com boa audiência enquanto exibe sua programação original.

Além do feito, ‘The Prisoner’ lidera as séries mais baixadas da semana no iTunes.