| Summary: | The 2009 Prisoner is an adaptation rather than a remake, as many changes from the original may be noticed. One of the most important adjustments is related to the use of surveillance in the creation of a dystopic society. The original series’ space, which was entirely submitted to Number 2’s gaze, could be defined as panoptic, an aspect of the show designed to expose the upcoming or possible evils of what would later be called the surveillance society. The 1967 Prisoner, however, mainly showed surveillance to be an instrument of power, even if the watchers’ gaze was sometimes equated with the spectators’, thereby proving TV to bring a different form of power, based on showing as much as on watching. An iconic change in the new version is that the 2009 Prisoner resigned from a New York-based surveillance company called Summakor, whereas his 1967 counterpart was a British government agent. This seemingly incidental relocation gives new meaning to the TV series as a whole, as surveillance, which was one of the prominent themes of the original programme, becomes a keystone of the whole plot in the 2009 Prisoner. The new series goes much further in investigating the media-related aspects of the surveillance society as well as the social and ideological changes prompted by the creation of new forms of surveillance technology (which have made panopticism a concept to be reassessed or even renewed). The aim of this paper is to show that the 2009 Prisoner manages to adapt the dimension of social criticism of the 1967 Village – the gilded cage the prisoner is sent to – by turning it into another form of dystopia, which takes into account the heightened importance of surveillance in contemporary society, as well as the major changes in the meaning and purposes of surveillance brought about by new technology.
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