Images via Macleans & ITV

One visionary salutes another as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of The Prisoner’s U.S. premiere.

Arguably the most profound and influential writer in the history of comic books, Alan Moore has authored such seminal works as Watchmen (the sole graphic title on Time’s list of best novels since 1923), From Hell, V for Vendetta, and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, as well as the novels Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem and the epic poem The Mirror of Love (and so much more). The Guardian’s Steve Rose once dubbed him “the undisputed high priest of the medium, whose every word is seized upon like a message from the ether” by comics fans. Comics historian George Khoury said that calling Moore the best writer in the history of comics is an understatement.

Upshot: Moore is a genius.

Plus, he’s an ardent admirer of The Prisoner, the Delphic, genre-bending seventeen-episode British TV series cocreated by Patrick McGoohan, who also starred, as a former secret agent (McGoohan had previously starred as John Drake in Danger Man, or Secret Agent, as it was known in the U.S.) who, following his resignation, is abducted and whisked away to a mysterious coastal-village resort where people are known by numbers rather than names and aspiring escapees are subdued by militaristic balloon-like devices called Rovers. The Prisoner debuted in the U.K. in 1967, and in the U.S. (on CBS) the following year — so, fifty years ago. My, how time flies.

Many writers, producers, and directors revere this show, like Moore, including Christopher Nolan, Twin Peak’s Mark Frost, and X-Files creator Chris Carter, and have cited as influences on their own work; it has been toasted in countless films, television shows, songs, comics, and novels.

In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary, the Paley Center reached out recently to Moore, who graciously agreed to respond to a list of questions submitted (and answered) via email. The Q+A follows.

Tip of the hat to Joe Brown.

David Bushman: You were just thirteen years old (on the cusp of 14) when The Prisoner premiered in the U.K. Did you watch it then or did you see first it when you were older?

Alan Moore: I was a keen viewer from the first broadcast episode, which if I remember correctly (and there’s a fair chance that I don’t) went out on a Wednesday night. I’d already become intrigued by some of the later episodes of Dangerman — including a dream sequence with a giant syringe that, atmospherically, was almost a Prisoner pilot — but was obviously unprepared, along with most of the viewing public, for the experience of McGoohan’s masterpiece. Given that I was then just entering puberty and adolescence, when we are all at our most receptive and our most impressionable, I think that early viewing was at least partly responsible for rewiring my aesthetic, critical and creative sensibilities, shifting them to a new and different register.

DB: What appealed to you about the show then, and what appeals to you about it now? How much of it did you understand initially as ergodic storytelling?

AM: First and foremost, it was the show’s experimentalism and radicalism that made the impact. Some of its sensibilities were already in the televisual air around then, with the wackier Avengers episodes and Anthony Newley’s Strange World of Gurney Slade (which I hadn’t then seen), but it was The Prisoner which seemed to most perfectly synthesise these exciting new elements and approaches into a coherent vehicle, a vehicle apparently aimed at affecting the mind of the viewer in ways that, outside of avant garde theatre and cinema, the general public hadn’t previously encountered.

I certainly didn’t understand it as ergodic storytelling at that point, and in fact have just had to look up the word “ergodic.” If I’m interpreting the term correctly, ergodic storytelling would be narratives that go through their permutations but always return to an underlying state of ongoing stability, an example being most serials and soap operas: disruptions to the underlying situation will provide the excitement and motivations for a given number of episodes, but once the disruption has been resolved the ongoing narrative will settle back to its basic state, ready for the next thrilling or amusing disruption. While The Prisoner seemed to hammer home its ergodic nature — with the bars slamming across McGoohan’s face at the end of each episode after another thwarted escape — it never really seemed to me to be playing to the comforting endless stasis of a show like, say, The Fugitive. It always seemed as if this was a narrative that was heading towards a fixed point and a conclusion.

DB: What impact has The Prisoner had on your own work and sensibility?

AM: Well, one of the things I learned was that one should preferably craft narratives that move towards a satisfying and meaningful conclusion. Another thing I learned was that it was possible to write stories that affected the audience on other levels than just the simple resolution of their plot elements; that there were levels of symbolism and association and self-reflexivity which could be built into a narrative that would enable the viewer or reader to enjoy the experience in a more intense and multileveled way. Perhaps most importantly, it taught me that a creator should never be afraid to pitch their work high, without worrying about it going over the heads of the audience: in my experience, work that the audience already understands and is comfortable with will not teach them anything, and thus deprives them of that thrill-of-the-new that is, for me, the central pleasure and purpose of all art. I believe that art only happens at the interface of the artist and the audience, which is to say the work itself, and I further believe that if they don’t have to do any of that work, if they don’t have to stretch themselves a little in order to metabolise what they’re reading or watching, then the audience will not find the work as enjoyable as they might have done. So, The Prisoner taught me not to condescend to my audience or assume that they were any less intelligent than I was. It taught me to dare to be difficult, and eventually led me to a position where I feel that the most precious thing about art is its difficulty, and that difficulty’s overcoming.

DB: Whom do you see as the wardens of our prisons?

AM: This seems to relate to my answers to questions eight and nine, so I’ll probably leave my response until then.

DB: I’ve read interviews where you talk about the impact of The Prisoner on The League of Extraordinary Men: Century, one-third of which is set in 1969, so more or less contemporaneous to The Prisoner, particularly about the impact of change. Patrick McGoohan once said, “I think we are progressing too fast. I think that we should pull back and consolidate the things that we’ve discovered.” Can you talk about the thematic similarities between these two works — Century and The Prisoner?

AM: I don’t remember the interviews you cite, and don’t remember The Prisoner having a particular impact on Century. In The Black Dossier, on the other hand, we make a number of references to John Drake, a “special village” in Wales, “killer balloons” and dream-inducement technology, and I think that a young 1958 version of John Drake is even visible in the background at one point. As regards McGoohan’s comments on the alarming acceleration of progress, I think this makes a different point to the one we were trying to make in Century, which is not so much deploring the acceleration of progress — which I feel is just a given of our human situation, for better or worse — as it is remarking upon the apparent collapse of worthwhile culture that is incidental to that progress. I think the main difference is that we were taking about culture, while McGoohan was talking about society.

DB: Here’s another quote from McGoohan: “I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself. … They’re making bigger and better bombs, faster planes, and all this stuff. There’s never been a weapon created yet on the face of the earth that hasn’t been used. I don’t know how we’re going to stop it now. It’s too late, I think.” This naturally conjured up thoughts of Watchmen. I’m wondering if The Prisoner had any influence on that book, either directly or indirectly?

AM: While all my work probably has the influence of The Prisoner in it somewhere, this would be entirely in how the story is told, rather than in its content or thematic elements. Practically every intelligent or informed person during that decade would have been expressing opinions about technology and nursing nuclear anxieties that were identical to McGoohan’s, and given that the 1980s were an even more perilous stretch of the Cold War than the 1960s had been, then it seemed an appropriate issue to make a part of Watchmen. I can’t think of any direct or indirect influence beyond that.

DB: I’ve watched interviews with Patrick McGoohan where he comes across as deeply pessimistic for the fate of mankind. Do you share that pessimism or do you harbor some hope deep inside?

AM: I would say that given what I have come to understand about environmental issues and the ongoing Grand Guignol parade of entitled incompetents and sociopaths that we regard as global politics, I would probably be seen as much more pessimistic than Patrick McGoohan, although I don’t personally feel that this is the case. My own Eternalist position is that all lives — whether those of individuals, or of institutions, or of entire species — must eventually come to an end, both for practical and aesthetic reasons: as in my answer above to your question about ergodic storytelling (see? I’ve only known the word for an hour and already I’m using it like a pro), unless a narrative has an ending, it doesn’t possess any overall meaning. Consider Shakespeare’s Macbeth as it is, and then consider a serialised HBO version that is designed to run, theoretically, until the end of time. The first has powerful human meaning, and talks about how sometimes the decisions we make change everything and cannot be undone. The second is a soap opera, which, with its constant return to an ergodic baseline, is saying pretty much the exact opposite.

Looking at the human race in the context of linear time, which is the context in which it sees itself, its history and its future, then fairly obviously it is going to end at some point. That ending will presumably be a horrible affair for those that experience it, whether it happens next week or in a million years from now, and after it has occurred we will be gone forever. Note that I could have stated the above in terms of a single human life — one day you’re going to die, you probably won’t enjoy it and then you’ll be dead forever after — and that this formulation of the human experience inevitably casts it as a tragedy. If, however, we conceive of space/time as Einstein’s “block universe,” then all our narratives become exactly that: narratives, with a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion. Narratives that exist forever in a continuum where time is a solid, just as a book or a film or a piece of recorded music hypothetically exists forever, and which hold a meaning that can be endlessly reconsidered and re-evaluated and enjoyed.

What I’m saying is that when and how the end of humanity comes isn’t really a major issue, and that this is also true regarding how and when we personally reach the end of our individual lives. These are endings, just like with a book or a beloved TV series, and while endings can have tremendous impact and meaning, they’re generally nowhere near as important as the quality of the narrative that preceded them. An ending just means that the work of art is completed, is properly finished, and can now begin to be understood. So, according to the way I see things, while Patrick McGoohan and me and all the pessimists in the world will inevitably one day be proven right, from my ultimately very optimistic perspective none of this matters. I think if we, as individuals and as a species, focus on living our lives as constructively and enjoyably as possible in the here and now, rather than fixating anxiously upon an imaginary end-point that, when it comes, we’ll know very little about anyway, we might be happier in those lives and might even possibly extend them. I’d only note that while I’m personally very comfortable with this formulation, it has been known to send both optimists and pessimists screaming into the night. Caveat emptor.

Paley Matters is a publication of The Paley Center for Media.