How does a show that only ran for seventeen episodes become a cult series? Toss in the best of 1960s British culture, add a large helping of science fiction and fantasy, stir in a bit of psychological manipulation and voila, a hit.

The British spy thriller, The Prisoner,  ran from 1967-1968, and has a large following, but some fans still don’t really know exactly what the show was about. Some surmise that Patrick McGoohan, the star of Britain’s spy show, Danger Man, carried over his portrayal of the character John Drake, from that show, a fact that McGoohan denies. In the opening of The Prisoner , the secret agent suddenly resigns from his intelligence role and is held captive in the Orwellian Village that refuses to let him go, until the powers to be extract from him the reason that he resigned.

Interestingly enough, the people who are being held in this village, have every desire taken care of, yet they have no real freedom at all. The former spy is given the name Number Six and becomes the lone wolf who pushes back at the oppressive government leaders, each one successively known as Number two, with civil disobedience and plans to escape.

McGoohan wrote, produced and directed many of the episodes, and co-created the series with George Markstein. The original series re-aired on the Independent Film Channel and has been released on DVD.

On November 15, 2009, a not-so-critically-acclaimed six-episode miniseries remake began airing, and stars James Caviezel, Ian McKellen and Ruth Wilson. In addition, the cult series has had numerous novels written about it, comics fashioned after it, not to mention the Apple II computer games that were based on it. A proposed film version from Universal Pictures never made it out of the development stages.

Sadly for fans, a compromise between McGoohan and producer Lew Grade limited the number of episodes to 17, and co-creator George Markstein quit after just 13 episodes due to creative differences with McGoohan. In spite of all that, the series continued, and drew legions of followers for the suspenseful mind-bending allegory that it was.