AMC Has a Lot on the Line With 'The Prisoner'

AMC clearly needs to have more than 26 weeks of originals to bolster its movie-laden schedule, particularly with other basic cable channels aggressively expanding their original programming schedules.

“In this day and age, you can’t rely on two original series,” Brad Adgate, programming analyst for Horizon Media, told TheWrap. “They have to replenish their pipeline with other original series.”

Adgate believes the hard part for AMC -- developing an original programming style and brand -- is already behind them.

“At least they know what style is going to work for them,” he noted. “They know what kind of shows the ‘Mad Men’ viewer is watching when they’re not watching AMC. They now have a whole body of research from which they can draw conclusions.”

Yet Collier insists that upcoming offerings, including “The Prisoner,” will be tonally unique from both “Mad Men” and Breaking Bad.”

“We’re not trying to serve the exact same audience,” he said. “‘Mad Men’ delivers the most upscale audience on television, but the reason why we developed ‘Breaking Bad’ was that it was an incredible way to target men. We pair it up with movies that deliver the same thing, and we have a powerful mechanism for advertisers and affiliates to superserve that male audience."

In keeping with that theme, Sunday night’s debut of “The Prisoner” will be preceded with the full airing of the similarly dystopic-future-oriented “Matrix Trilogy.”

It’s the same complementary strategy that was employed back in 2007 for the pilot episode of “Mad Men,” which followed a showing of Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” -- a film, Collier told TheWrap, that portrayed a “Mad Men”-like world of guys drinking, smoking and getting away with pretty much anything they want.

“This weekend, we’re going to super-serve the sci-fi audience,” Collier explained.

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