Television: The Private I

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Best proof that a TV action show can ignore sensationalism and still be entertaining was CBS's Secret Agent series. Its star, the supercool Briton Patrick McGoohan, ignored the production executives who insisted that he imitate James Bond. "They wanted me to carry a gun and have an affair with a different girl in each episode," he recalls, but McGoohan had his way through 45 lively episodes with nary a kiss or a kill. Though it was never a blockbuster of a hit, Secret Agent ran for two years, and is now successfully syndicated in reruns. McGoohan, 40, is trying again with a new made-in-Britain series called The Prisoner (CBS). This time, he plays not only the title role but also is executive producer, director and occasional writer.

McGoohan regards The Prisoner as a protest against "the dehumanizing, the 'numeralization,' the loss of individuality which is happening to us all"—a thought that, he might add, is fast becoming a benumbing cliché. The setting for the series is deliberately metaphorical: an idyllic castle complex surrounded by fields, mountains and sea. The spirit is gay and relaxed. But behind the Graustarkian exteriors (shot in the Welsh resort village of Penrhyndeudraeth) lurk electronic bugs and brainwashing gear that make the mood more nearly Orwellian. "The Village," as it is called, is in fact a detention camp for retired spies, defectors, nuclear scientists and others whose memories are weighted with state secrets. Among the purposeful ambiguities of the series is that neither the prisoner nor the viewer is ever certain which side of the Iron Curtain he is on.

Superficially, the plot of each episode concerns an escape attempt by Prisoner McGoohan, a former agent. But he never makes it. He is caught either by betrayal of his fellow prisoners or by The Village's "Rover" device, a retriever balloon that recaptures runaways without bloodshed. The upshot—and McGoohan's message—is, in his words, that "people are the prisoners of our society." Such downbeat endings and murky symbolism seem unlikely to win high ratings, so CBS has scheduled the series only as a June-September fillin.

Contemplative Character. In "beating the drum of the individual," as he puts it, McGoohan sometimes uses too heavy a stick. Denied his name and called "Number Six," the prisoner shouts: "I will not be pushed, filed, indexed, debriefed or numbered! I am not a number! I am a person!" Unfortunately, McGoohan also employs excessive ambiguity. (For example, Number Two, the camp's Big Brother, is mysteriously replaced every week.)

Perhaps the prime saving and selling point of the series is the magnetism of McGoohan himself: he has a contemplative personality suggesting greater dimension than that commanded by standard leading men. Born of Irish parents in New York City, he was raised in Britain, where he played in repertory before becoming London's highest-priced TV star.