THE 1960s have been very, very good to AMC, whose Emmy-winning "Mad Men" transformed it from a cable channel known exclusively for classic - and sometimes not-so-classic - movies to a player in the realm of original series.

So it's easy to see why it was attracted to "The Prisoner," the iconic 1967 show that fans are still puzzling over more than 40 years later.

But the six-part "reimagining" of the original, which AMC will show over three nights starting Sunday, is bound to strike some of those fans as merely ironic.

Because there's nothing quite like a remake to drive home a point about individualism, is there?

Patrick McGoohan, who created "The Prisoner" and starred as the trapped "Number Six" for its 17-episode run, died in January, just days after Trevor Hopkins, an executive producer of the new miniseries, had assured reporters in Los Angeles that McGoohan "loved the casting," which included Jim Caviezel as Six and Ian McKellen as Two, the man in charge of "The Village" where Six finds himself trapped.

Since McGoohan presumably never saw the finished project, which only finished filming in South Africa late last year, we'll never know what he'd have thought.

In any case, the reputation of his "Prisoner," which is currently available for full-screen streaming at amctv.com, remains safe.

Despite the occasional presence of those scary bouncing balls, AMC's version is a very different piece of work, with a different story and a different message.

The original, a child of both the Cold War and a post-World War II Britain where the safety net was nearly solid, masqueraded as a spy drama but featured villains ultimately less concerned with uncovering Six's secrets than with tamping down his will.

AMC's remake, which was written by Bill Gallagher, is decidedly post-9/11, despite the occasional appearance of some familiar-looking twin towers shimmering in the distance.

There's considerably less emphasis on Six's objections to being referred to as a number - and given the multiplication of PIN numbers and passwords in most of our lives, a single digit, or even a string of them, has its appeal - and more on the price we pay for what we tend to regard as our freedom to behave badly.

Like ABC's "V," which is considerably slicker than its '80s predecessor, the new "Prisoner" looks marvelous, even if its desertlike location is initially a lot less appealing to the eye than the original Village, filmed on the lush grounds of a hotel in Wales.

But also like "V" (so far), it doesn't seem to have as much to say. Though in many ways more coherent than the original, whose finale now strikes me as part music video, part acid trip, it turns out to be little more than a grim fairy tale, its ultimate message a bit muddled, but not in a way that makes me want to spend the next few decades trying to figure it out.

Still, with all due respect to the many actors who played Two opposite McGoohan's Six - the position was seemingly recast each time the character failed to get Six to assimilate - I'm happy to have seen McKellen go the distance in the role.

His Two, a menace with a nearly perpetual twinkle in his eye, is the best reason I can think of not to try to escape "The Prisoner." *

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