The miniseries purports to tell Houdini’s story, but what it really portrays is a series of spectacles, each emptier than the next.

Unfortunately, tonight's History Channel two-part miniseries Houdini, written by Nicholas Meyer and starring Academy Award winner Adrien Brody as Harry Houdini, fails to deliver on every one of these counts. And at the very least, there should be at least a dash of uncertainty something that can be paid off in the same way The Prestige resolves the workings of its seemingly impossible dual Transported Man feats. Illusionist as a profession, like most careers, generally can’t sustain narrative entertainment by itself-the characters have to be compelling, have to make us care about the magic. Otherwise, how can we wonder if the trick will be successful, and when it is, feel compelled to make an effort to puzzle out what happened? In movies or TV, there’s an additional layer of artifice between the viewer and the “magician” that replaces the mystery of magic with the mystery of post-production.

But magic really only works when the audience is experiencing it in, if not real life, at least real time. Tricks-sorry, illusions-are effective when they have a proper setup and a willing audience that’s looking to be hoodwinked (not unlike a TV audience). Sorry magicians, it’s not that you’re uninteresting-it’s that what you do is just really hard to dramatize. Making magic compelling on-screen is a really difficult trick.

Houdini history channel