Did anyone watch The Prisoner miniseries on AMC? It’s a remake of a series from the 1960s, presented in three two-hour installments, or, depending on how you like to divide things, six one-hour installments. It aired Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of this week, but it will be re-aired starting on Sunday.

Anyway, it’s pretty awesome.

It starts with Jim Caviezal waking up amnesiac in a desert to the sounds of gunfire as a militia hunts down an unarmed old man.

He soon learns that he’s been somehow transported to the outskirts of a creepy little town run by Ian McKellen and known as The Village, kind of like in the M. Night Shyamalan movie, only this time I wasn’t able to predict the plot twist from the trailer.

Residents in The Village cannot escape, and many don’t want to, as they are unaware that anyplace besides The Village even exists. But Caviezal — known as 6, since everyone in The Village is numbered — remembers living in New York, and suspects at least a few other villagers have pre-Village memories, too.

I’m not finished watching it yet plus I don’t want to spoil anything, so I won’t recap the plot any further. The narrative itself, though, is disjointed and nebulous, so the viewer — through the first two hours at least — feels a bit like 6 must: confused and without foundation.

The show appears to be thematically and aesthetically similar to Lost, one of my favorite TV shows of all-time. Some of the parallels are so striking that it seems like Lost might be borrowing heavily from the original — which I haven’t seen — or, alternately, that the AMC remake was made with Lost in mind.

One advantage it has over that series is its abbreviated format. Though I’ve invested countless hours watching and rewatching the first five seasons of Lost, I’m still a bit skeptical that it the narrative will conclude in some satisfying way, as — despite claims to the contrary — it’s always unclear whether the writers and producers had an ending in mind at the series’ outset.

With a miniseries there are no such concerns. Clearly everyone responsible for The Prisoner knew exactly when and how the story would wrap from the start of the project, so the plotline should be tighter and more clearly defined.

That’s cool, and with scripted serial sci-fi dramas all the rage these days, I hope that the industry trends toward more programs with planned end-dates, as is more common in Europe.

I recognize that there are some pretty huge differences between the American and British television industries and that ratings have long determined the length of series in the States. But since shows like Lost bank on viewers making long-term investments in solving their mysteries and trusting the writers to end them well — leaps of faith, if you will — it strikes me that, after a few disappointing or dragged-out series finales, it might become a better business strategy to assure audiences that the storyline is fully crafted from before a show’s premiere.