The Prisoner

The Prisoner is a British television series broadcast in 1967 and co-created by and starring Patrick McGoohan as a former secret agent who resigns abruptly and is then abducted and held in an isolated, outwardly pleasant coastal community known only as the Village, where prisoners are identified by number rather than name and McGoohan's character is designated Number Six. Across seventeen episodes the series combines espionage, political allegory and surreal, often deliberately ambiguous imagery, refusing straightforward answers to the central mysteries of who runs the Village and why. It has been widely influential on later science fiction and spy television and is regarded as one of the most distinctive and debated works in the medium's history.