Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-prisoner"

After my post on David McCallum’s Invisible Man on Monday, several folks let me know they appreciated the short reference to another “Spy-Fi” series, VR.5. Because of their interest, I decided to dive into my files and share my notes on that show:

VR.5
(Fox) March 10--May 12, 1995

For Samoset Productions, John Sacret Young and Jeannine Renshaw created VR.5, a “Spy-fi” series crafted for adult audiences. The depth of the show has been compared with that of The Prisoner, notably the themes of mind-games and deceptive realities.
The central character was Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer), a telephone lines operator and computer hacker drawn into the convoluted and conflicting games of the secret “Committee” when she discovered how to enter and manipulate the subconscious dream-world of virtual reality. Sydney could type out a desired destination on her screen, use her phone to call someone she wanted to take along on a journey to another dimension, and when the caller answered, she slammed the phone into the computer modem. A swooch of special effects sent them into the fifth realm of virtual reality. In the dream-like VR5 world, Bloom could alter physical reality, the halfway point to VR.10 where mental powers wouldn’t need computers.
In the early episodes, Bloom believed her father, Dr. Joseph Bloom (David McCallum), a neurobiolotist pioneer, and her twin-sister were killed in a car accident. The mysterious circumstances left her mother (Louise Fletcher) in a catatonic state. Sydney was counseled by childhood friend Duncan (Michael Easton) who draws from Zen and other philosophical systems to help ground Sydney as she explored her abilities.
For the first four episodes, Sydney was also helped by VR guru Dr. Frank Morgan (Will Patton). But after Sydney attracted the interest of the invisible security organization called "the Committee," Morgan disappeared and Oliver Sampson (Anthony Head) was assigned to be her controller. He became a manipulative love interest in a relationship similar to that of Nikita and Michael in Le Femme Nikita.
Eventually Sydney learned her father and sister were alive and under the power of one faction of the “Committee” who'd placed false memories of the accident in her mind. In the end, she learned her father achieved VR.8 consciousness with The ability to transplant or implant personalities from one mind to another.
The creative team was noted for its then cutting-edge high-quality special-effects as in digitally altering colors when scenes took place inside the virtual reality system. But this process took four weeks to complete at a cost of up to $1.5 million per episode. For this reason, a poor time-slot, and apparently considerable behind-the-scenes arguing among the participants, the uneasy network only ordered ten episodes and only broadcast nine before dropping a show with minimal ratings.
It can be said VR5 was The Prisoner of the 1990s. “The Committee” is similar to the watchers of Number Six, omnipresent and frightening, using the alternating guises of toughness and tenderness. Like one episode of The Prisoner in which Number Six endured a personality transfer from one body to another, Sydney’s father had apparently done the same. Nods to other earlier spy dramas were evident in details such as the names of Sydney’s goldfish--Steed and Mrs. Peel. Drawing explicit connections to the popularity of The X-Files, executive producer Thania St. John stated that "VR will try to capture that same, creepy feeling."
VR5 had a second-life on the Sci-Fi channel in 1997 including first airings of three episodes not broadcast on the original Fox run. Because of the show’s focus on mind-games, secret governmental duplicity, and alternate realities, the show gained a fan base generating detailed WebPages, notably Virtual Storm, a group dedicated to keeping VR.5 alive. For a short time, this group raised interest in having a two-hour movie produced based on the series, but production never took place.
The series was broadcast on CBS Drama in Europe in early 2014.
 

Here’s alink to the opening credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8...

Also at Youtube, the pilot episode is at the same link.


Here’s the Amazon link to purchase the show on DVD:
https://www.amazon.com/VR-5-1995-Seri...

And here’s a 2011 review of the series, from a “looking back to the ‘90s” perspective:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/20799/...