Most generations of TV watchers will almost certainly have heard of Twin Peaks , Lost , and Battlestar Galactica , but very few will know about The Prisoner . Yet, without this seminal mystery spy-fi series, none of these classics of modern television would have been created. Like nothing else before it, The Prisoner gave the 1960s a glimpse into the small screen’s future.

The show’s singular narrative vision, inverse approach to setting up its premise, and integration of surrealist elements into its storytelling, paved the way for the modern mystery box dramas of prestige television. If many TV shows today wouldn’t exist without Twin Peaks , then the same ones and a great deal more wouldn’t have happened were it not for The Prisoner .

A British production about an in

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