Prisoner became as controversial as it was popular. In its frequent grimness, pathos, sadness, toughness of address, occasional violence, and atmosphere of threat, it appeared very decidedly to be adult drama, its “look” spare, hard, dynamic. Yet ethnographic research pointed to Prisoner’s consistent appeal to schoolchildren, not least schoolgirls, perhaps identifying the harsher screws with cordially disliked teachers. It was not the favorite text of school principals and was the subject of complaint by them.

With Prisoner, the audience is invited to sympathize and empathize with a particular group of prisoners, in particular, mother figure Bea Smith, aunt figure Judy Bryant, grandmother figure Lizzie Birdsworth, as well as some young prisoners, the acting daughters and granddaughters, Doreen and Maxie and Bobby. Often this group is shown at work in the prison laundry, where Bea rules as “top dog,” having the right to press the clothes. Here Bea and her “family” resist the oppression of a labor process the prison management forces on them by taking smokes, having fun, exercising cheek and wit, chatting, planning rituals such as birthday celebrations, or being involved in dramas of various kinds that distract them from the boredom of work.

Such “kinship” relationships, often remembered rather wistfully by ex-prisoners who are having a hard time of it alone on the outside, offer the possibility of close friendship, fierce loyalty, cooperation, genuine concern for each other: an image of communitas, inversionary since it is this community of “good” prisoners, not those in authority, whom the text continually invites us to sympathize and empathize with. Opposed to the powerful resourceful figure of Bea are various other women, also powerful personalities, such as Kate or Nola MacKenzie or Marie Winters, individualistic and ruthlessly selfish, manipulative and wily, who scheme and plot (sometimes with harsh screws like Joan Ferguson, known as the Freak, who is also corrupt, or Vera Bennett, known as Vinegar Tits) to topple Bea and destroy her authority and influence.

In Prisoner, however, relationships of all kinds are always complicated, shifting, and often uncertain. Not all screws are harsh; there is, for example, Meg, more a social worker, though still suspected by the women. The struggle between those who take a more permissive, helping approach, such as Meg, and the advocates of rigid discipline like Ferguson and Bennett and, to a lesser degree, Colleen Powell goes on and on and is never resolved, as each approach is alternately seen to result in further tension, restlessness, and disorder. As the women’s leader, Bea is particularly ambivalent. She possesses impressive wisdom about human relations, which she shrewdly uses for the benefit of the prisoners as a whole. She dislikes and tries to counter or sometimes punish actions that are self-seeking and competitive at the expense of what she perceives as a family group. But if Bea is a kind of moral center in Prisoner, she is an unusual and complex one, drawn as she is to exerting her control through violence or the threat of it: after killing her, she brands “K” (for killer) on Nola MacKenzie’s chest with a soldering iron (Nola had tried to drive Bea insane over the memory of her dead daughter Debbie).

Prisoner relies very little on conventional definitions of masculinity and femininity, beyond the basic point that sympathy generated for the women rests on the perception that women are not usually violent or physically dangerous. Many of the women are very strong characters indeed, active and independent. Bea, Nola, Marie Winters, the Freak are most unusual in the gallery of characters of television drama. They are not substitute men, but active strong women. Strength and gentleness are not distributed in Prisoner on male-female lines. The binary image of the powerful man and the weak or decorative woman is simply not there. Nor are the women in Prisoner in the least glamorized. They are usually dressed in shabby prison uniforms, while those on remand usually appear in fairly ordi-nary clothes. Their faces suggest no makeup, and they range in bodily shape from skinny wizened old Lizzie (loving, concerned, and kind, yet also a mischievous old lag rather like a child, liable to get herself into trouble) to the big girls like Bea, Doreen, and Judy. Their faces, luminously featured as in so much serial melodrama, are shown as grainy and interesting, faces full of character, with signs of hardship and suffering, alternately soft and hard, happy and depressed, angry or bored. The women are not held up voyeuristically as sexual objects but present themselves as human, female, subjects.

Although Prisoner talks to very contemporary, historically specific concerns, it also draws on much wider, longer, older cultural histories. Prisoner can be located in a long female tradition of inversion and inversionary figures in popular culture, from the “unruly” or “disorderly” women of early modern Europe evoked by Natalie Zemon Davis as Women on Top to the rebellious Maid Marian’s important in Robin Hood ballads and associated festivities of the May-games, to the witches of 17th-century English stage comedy. In such “wise witch” figures, we perhaps approach the female equivalent of the male mythological tradition of Robin Hood, Dick Turpin, Rob Roy—outlaws and tricksters who, like Bea in Prisoner, inspire fear as well as admiration.

In addition to drawing from such carnivalesque traditions of world upside-down, misrule, and charivari, Prisoner speaks to and takes in new directions dramas of crime on television where private passions erupt into public knowledge, debate, contestation, judgment. As dramaturgy, Prisoner revels in the possibilities of the TV serial form, of cliff-hangers at the end of episodes, intensifying melodrama as (in Peter Brooks’s terms in The Melodramatic Imagination) an aesthetic of excess. Prisoner is already a classic of serial melodrama, yet, in world television, there is and has been nothing else quite like it.