The Forgotten 1960s Show That Inspired Twin Peaks, Lost & Battlestar Galactica

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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 intelligence officer who winds up in a mysterious, isolated location known simply as “the Village” where people are referred to by number, the series has cast its influence wide over the development of various TV genres since it first appeared in 1967. Yet, beyond its cult following, The Prisoner has never reached a mass audience. Akin to television’s version of landmark avant-garde rock album The Velvet Underground & Nico, it feels as though almost everyone who’s seen the show has been inspired to make their own. Just as a plethora of mystery dramas have tried to be the next Lost since it aired, Lost itself was trying to be a new version of The Prisoner. The Prisoner Inspired Twin Peaks, Lost & Battlestar Galactica The creatives behind three of the most acclaimed and important TV series of modern times have all acknowledged the crucial role that The Prisoner played in inspiring their most celebrated projects. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session back in November 2017, Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost confirmed that The Prisoner was “definitely” a “general influence” on his show. Its role in inspiring Twin Peaks is obvious when we consider the tonal similarities between the two series. They’re both infused with surrealist visuals, unsettling musical motifs, and off-kilter dialogue, and share the premise of an intelligence agent being dropped into a distinctly alien small-town settlement, which gradually erodes his sense of free will. Meanwhile, Lost’s co-creator J.J. Abrams admitted the direct influence The Prisoner had on his magnum opus, in an interview with TV Guide back in 2009. “I loved The Prisoner, which was a very odd sort of hybrid of sci-fi, mystery and character,” Abrams explained. “There are elements of The Prisoner in both Alias and Lost.” Indeed, while Lost first appears to be a straightforward survival story, the discovery of preexisting human settlements on the show’s island, undertaking secretive work with strange technology, immediately turns it into a Prisoner-like scenario. Without The Prisoner’s influence on Abrams, his show might never have evolved in this darker and more complex direction. Even Ronald D. Moore’s iconic reboot of the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica owes a considerable debt to The Prisoner. In David Bassom’s book Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion, Moore confirmed that Tricia Helfer’s Cylon Number Six is named after Patrick McGoohan’s protagonist in The Prisoner. Mark Frost, J.J. Abrams & Ronald D. Moore Are All Huge Fans Of The Prisoner The extent of The Prisoner’s influence over Twin Peaks, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica becomes clear when we realize just how much Frost, Abrams, and Moore idolize the show. In addition to Abrams professing how much he “loved” The Prisoner, Frost described in a recent Radio Times interview how the series fundamentally transformed his perception of television. “[It] blew the top of my head off,” he said. “I didn’t think that sort of storytelling was possible. Believe me, I filed those sorts of things away." Two decades later, many of these sorts of things would be pulled out of the filing cabinet and working into Twin Peaks. Similarly, Ronald D. Moore has explained how watching The Prisoner while he was developing Battlestar Galactica inevitably affected his show. “At that point I was discovering, for the first time, The Prisoner on DVD,” Moore told IGN in 2012. “And I was just in love with The Prisoner, so I decided to name [the Cylon model] Number 6.” If Lost changed fandom in the sci-fi genre, then The Prisoner changed the sci-fi genre via its biggest fans. Patrick McGoohan couldn’t have known it when his single-season spy-fi masterpiece was released to little fanfare in 1967, but he’d soon inspire a whole generation of show creators to make new ground of their own. The Prisoner Likely Also Had A Major Influence On Squid Game, Black Mirror & Severance The show’s influence didn’t stop with Twin Peaks, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica, though. While it hasn’t been publicly acknowledged, The Prisoner clearly inspired elements of more recent shows like Squid Game, Severance, and Black Mirror. For instance, Squid Game’s numbered players trapped in a fight to the death in a game controlled by unknown operatives is distinctly Prisoneresque. The first scene of Severance, in which Helly R. is asked about her own identity after waking up in an eerily sterile unknown location, is a setup lifted straight from the opening of The Prisoner’s first episode. The generally jarring tone of the dialogue inside Lumon Industries is right out of The Prisoner’s playbook, too. What’s more, numerous Black Mirror episodes draw inspiration from The Prisoner, especially ones set into remote dystopias, or which are underscored by the sudden and unsettling introduction of advanced technology beyond the control of the protagonists. In fact, there are very few sci-fi mystery box shows of this caliber that don’t draw on The Prisoner in one form or another. Mystery Box Shows Wouldn’t Exist Today Without The Prisoner The whole idea of a “mystery box” TV show wouldn’t have become part of our small-screen vocabulary were it not for The Prisoner. To the above examples, we can add The Leftovers, which also was created by J.J. Abrams’ Lost collaborator, Damon Lindelof, as well as Westworld and The OA. Indeed, most of the best mystery box shows feature a Prisoner reference or two buried woven into their stories. The breadth of its influence demonstrates how many more viewers the series deserves. Among modern TV viewers and the mainstream media, The Prisoner has been all but forgotten. If it received the recognition proportional to its impact on today’s television landscape, it would be one of the most viewed shows in history.