The Prisoner (1967)
As weird as it may sound, The Prisoner is one of my favorite comfort TV watches. Sure, it’s a psychological thriller about a former British Intelligence agent who is psychologically tortured on a creepy island. But Patrick McGoohan’s performance as Number Six has some of the greatest emotional range you’ll ever see on a screen. The Prisoner doesn’t have the deluge of blood and gore that accompanies the morality tests of Squid Game. It does, however, showcase a similar stripping of one’s mental stability as those in control work to expose their subjects’ true, carnal motivations in life. In one of the best episodes of the show, Number Six is placed in an Embryo Room where he’s forced to relive different stages of his life—or possibly die. Unfortunately for Patrick, there is no cash prize at the end of his torture, just an ambiguous future he may never escape from.
