A Foucault double?

[Peter Swanick as the Supervisor. From “Arrival,” the first episode of The Prisoner. First aired October 1, 1967.]

Elaine and I just started watching The Prisoner, which neither of us had watched before. (Thanks, Diane.) The series is prescient in so many ways, presenting a picture of life that anticipates the surveillance culture of our twenty-first century.

My first glimpse of Peter Swanick, who plays the Supervisor in eight episodes, made me think Foucault . The resemblance isn’t perfect: Michel Foucault typically wore white turtlenecks. The strange thing: it was not until 1975, years after The Prisoner aired, that Foucault published Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison [Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison ], which posits the panopticon as a model for modern surveillance culture.

So what was “Foucault” doing in this television series? Getting ideas for the book he was to write?

[As far as I can tell, the Internets have not noticed the Foucault–Swanick resemblance. The Prisoner is available at the Criterion Channel.]