Whoever decided to update ‘The Prisoner’ should be locked up

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The list of Stuff From The 1960s That Doesn’t Need To Be Relived just keeps getting longer: Beehive hairdos. Frankie and Annette movies. The Bay of Pigs. Fallout shelters. The Cowsills.

And now the latest entry, “The Prisoner.” Though it would eventually be hugely influential, the original 1968 version went almost unwatched. AMC’s new remake is merely unwatchable.

Dismal and disoriented, under-plotted and over-allegorized, the six-hour “Prisoner” miniseries that debuts on AMC Sunday night at 8 EST (it continues in the same time slot on Monday and Tuesday) is an exercise in full-tilt dramatic tedium that will appall anybody who remembers the original and bewilder anyone who doesn’t: What was the big deal about THAT?

A British import that lasted just 17 episodes as a CBS summer replacement show, the original “Prisoner” was a parable of Cold War exhaustion that crossbred Kafka and Orwell. Patrick McGoohan played a British intelligence agent who quit his job, only to be kidnapped and plunked down in a village full of ex-spies whose names had been replaced with numbers.

Alternating between subterfuge and threats, the village’s bosses constantly tried to learn the secrets of McGoohan’s character, now known only as No. 6. But it was never known whether his captors were the enemy or his own bosses, testing him: One of “The Prisoner’s” central conceits was the governments on both sides of the Cold War had grown to resemble one another in their disregard for individual liberties.

The rights of the individual against a collective, faceless bureaucracy — be it composed of Marxist apparatchiks or computerized Western technocrats — was always at the heart of “The Prisoner.” No. 6’s refrain under interrogation from his captors — “I will not be pushed, briefed, debriefed, stamped, indexed or numbered” — mockingly echoed the warning on the ubiquitous IBM punch cards with which the government tracked everything from Social Security checks to school attendance: “Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.”

“The Prisoner’s” anarchist politics and surrealist style were heady stuff in the “Leave It to Beaver” universe of 1960s television — much too heady for most of the adult audience of the day. But as its teenage fans grew up and began making their own TV shows and movies, “The Prisoner’s” resonance was clear. From the bizarre little town of “Twin Peaks” to the homogenized TV-stage world of “The Truman Show” to the mysterious island of “Lost,” the echoes of “The Prisoner” were unmistakable. Even the Syfy channel’s “Battlestar Galactica” offered a tip of its space helmet: The show’s sultry robot assassin was known only by her factory model number, 6.

But if some elements of “The Prisoner” have proven timeless, AMC’s miniseries proves conclusively that others aren’t. In an age when half of America wants nothing more from life than to appear on a reality show and the other half wants nothing more than to watch, “The Prisoner’s” concerns that we’re living in a fishbowl world (the village school even offers the kiddies a class in surveillance in which they get extra credit for spying on their parents) seem quaint at best.

Yet the real havoc wreaked on “The Prisoner” results from British playwright Bill Gallagher’s attempts at modernization in his screenplay. Gallagher has turned the village from a political gulag into something that seems suspiciously like a computer virtual-reality game. It’s populated not by ex-spies trying to come in from the cold, but random people with no memory of life before they appeared in the village — or even that a broader world exists. (“There is no OUT — there is only IN,” says one of the villagers.)

The few — including this version of No. 6, played by “The Passion of the Christ’s” Jim Caviezel — who hold fleeting memories of another existence are labeled “dreamers” and subjected to ruthless attempts at first therapy and then extinction, as if they were malfunctioning avatars in a game of “The Sims.”

This foray into existentialism is not entirely a deviation from the original version of “The Prisoner.” Unfortunately, it emphasizes the show’s dizzy surrealist elements at the expense of its storytelling. Reeling between doppelgangers and alt-selves, flashbacks and flashforwards, dreams and hallucinations, “The Prisoner” collapses under the weight of its own metaphors.

Confides one dazed character to No. 6: “I don’t even know if what I just told you is true or not.” Either way, it doesn’t matter.