For its third original dramatic series, AMC has chosen to reimagine -- as a six-episode miniseries that will run in a clump from Sunday to Tuesday -- Patrick McGoohan's 1967 British spy-fi show "The Prisoner." (It first aired here in 1968.) If the network, here co-producing with the U.K.'s Granada and ITV, was out to prove itself unafraid to mount another show as slow as "Mad Men," it has succeeded, with the difference that "Mad Men" is never boring.

In the original, a cult classic so revered that remaking it would seem the very definition of imprudent, McGoohan played a secret agent who resigned his job and awoke in a fanciful metaphor for the English class system called the Village, where the originalhe has been given a number, Six, for a name. Each week a new Number Two unsuccessfully tried to pry from McGoohan's Number Six the reason for his resignation, and most weeks Number Six tried unsuccessfully to escape or destroy the Village. Broadly speaking, it was a paean to the individual and the idea that even when resistance is futile, resisting is not.

"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered," said McGoohan's Number Six. "My life is my own."

The new Number Six -- just "Six," here -- is played by James Caviezel, who was Jesus for Mel Gibson. He is not a spy but a person whose job involves surveillance, and having resigned that job he, too, awakens in a strange place, the middle of the desert, where he meets a dying man dressed in McGoohan's old jacket. Eventually he makes his way to the Village, a kind of dusty imitation of a small town, where people live behind picket fences, all the cars are old-fashioned, psychoanalysis is still called "the talking cure" and most everyone loves their leader, Two (Ian McKellen).

But just why Six is there, and why he can't leave -- though the story keeps us rocketing between the Village and New York in simultaneously developing parallel threads -- or why anyone, on either side of the screen, should be particularly interested in his fate, is never made clear nor compelling. Neither as written nor as played does the character ever seem solid enough to root for or worry over.