I was about as excited about the prospect of a miniseries remake of TV classic The Prisoner as I was about the currently-running V remake. That is to say, I was wholly uninterested. Then I realized AMC was behind it. They make better shows (Mad Men, for one) than they've programmed movies in ages. Then they announced the cast, including Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen, and I was intrigued.
I still managed to miss all of it until a copy of The Prisoner (2009) DVD arrived in the mail. It's rare that I put in the first disc of a TV set I've never watched and then proceed to plow through the whole thing, but I did here. There are Brits doing some rather dodgy American accents and some overly-theatrical acting, but overall, it works as its own thing and comes off as provocative and engaging as one could hope.
The original is still definitey superior, but this iteration is like the trimmed-up, revised revival of a great play: it can't hope to live up to the original production, but it manages to do its own thing that's relevant to the here and now. It's not groundbreaking and life-changing as some have claimed its predecessor was, but it's a cut above the sea of crap that floods the digital subscriber box airwaves. Caviezel and McKellen are excellent, and the supporting cast is strong, especially Hayley Atwell as a mysterious woman who appears in Six's (Caviezel's) dreams. Just today, the news broke that Atwell will play Captain America's WWII-era love interest in the upcoming movie starring Chris Evans.
Included along with the series on DVD are some extended and deleted sequences from each of the six episodes, the Comic-Con panel, an interview with Ian McKellan, and a pair of behind the scenes/making-of things. It's set to start airing on ITV in Britain, and the early reviews have been pretty terrible. The general thrust behind them, though, is that "compared to the classic, hallowed original, it pales" and so on.
There's an utter lack of interest in evaluating it on its own terms, which is terribly lazy and unfair to all involved. We need more weird speculative fiction, and yes, remakes are not wholly without merit. Just look at John Carpenter's The Thing.