The premise of a premise is that the writer gets to introduce one absurd idea at the start, the viewer takes it for granted and suspends disbelief, and then the writer gets to talk about all the interesting things that happen because "strange premise X" is true. The premise of the original Prisoner is that the protagonist is caught in a happy totalitarian prison where all the other prisoners have bought into the happy prison life and he has to struggle to keep his own identity and/or subvert the system. Because this is a remake the writers parasitically assume that everyone "knows" this about the premise and then proceed to tear it up by introducing plot-like points that make no sense given the premise. Finally they reveal that the whole thing was just a dream and that is why the show doesn't match up with the premise; because they were lying about the premise the whole time.

This might have been forgivable if the show was good in it's own right, but it wasn't. At no time do you care about the characters; most of the time you are just scratching your head and saying "this show makes no sense given the premise." See io9's 6 things the new Prisoner changed for the worse which was written after the initial two episodes. They still believed the premise was genuine so the show was doggerel for not living up to them (as well as being poorly acted and paced). The only time the "big reveal" premise can work is when it makes everything leading up to it work doubly so, e.g. The Sixth Sense. In this case the writers just use "it was all a dream" as a crutch to explain that everything didn't make sense because it was all a dream and stuff.

I was once at a party and this guy walked up and told me his name was Ted. Then he laughed and said "I fooled you, my name is Steve!" then he laughed and said "I fooled you, my real name .." but at that point I had said my piece and walked away. I'll say the same thing to the writers of this show that I said to that guy .. Fuck You.