Oh, Oh, Oh, it's Magic!

I'm taking a break from the backlog to observe that there are a few magic shows on TV right now (most of them on SyFy and a couple on the CW).  And I’m happy about this.  I love performance magic.  I enjoy the feeling of almost being able to figure something out.  I’m particularly impressed by close-up magic involving cardistry or legerdemain, which require an enormous amount of skill, dexterity, and just plain practice to make effective and convincing.  I could watch Ricky Jay or Helder Guimaraes all day.  I also love the debunking mentalism of artists like Derren Brown, which shouldn’t be nearly as foolproof as it is.  I find it similarly thought-provoking. Stage magic is cool too, and I’m impressed when someone can effectively pull off a large-scale trick, but I have to say that the personal element of close-up magic really gets me even more.  So I’m thrilled that magic is back in the TV zeitgeist, even if it’s mostly on one channel.

But I’m noticing a commonality about the latest group of magic shows that I don’t love.  This isn’t a new aspect of performance magic by any stretch, and maybe I’m just noticing it more in these shows because I’ve been attuned to such things lately.  But…the performance magic on TV right now seems to be largely focused on making women uncomfortable.  In various ways.  In stage magic, the magician is much more often a man than a woman.  He either (a) calls a pretty lady on stage, preferably one who’s beautiful and has some demure humility, and embarrasses her a bit with flirty advances, tricks her, and sends her back to her seat blushing—or (b) takes all the credit for a trick whose hard part is actually performed by a very skilled, scantily clad contortionist with no speaking part.  In street magic, the magician (again, almost invariably a man) most often tricks women, and his tricks frequently involve flirting with and then tricking a woman who doesn’t seem entirely like she wants to be there.  I’m not saying it’s always this way with street magic—some of the tricks are directed at men—but when they are, they don’t have that uncomfortable flirting element that requires the woman to curl back in on herself demurely.  The men, in other words, can just sit back and enjoy being tricked.  The women, all too often, have to cringe through the whole experience.

So how does the most recent crop fare?

Wizard Wars (SyFy; season 1.5 began 1/29/2015. Performance/competition).

Watched:  season

Premise:  Iron Chef, but with magic.

Promise:  Two two-person teams of magicians who haven’t worked together before compete to build a show incorporating an assigned set of everyday objects; the winners compete with a new set of objects against the show’s better-known magician “wizards” for the title.  Penn & Teller are among the judges.  How enjoyable each episode is depends heavily on the teams’ abilities to create an entertaining show with what they’re given.  There’s a good bit of filler, especially the almost-surely-staged chunks of show where we watch the teams figure out what to do with their objects.  I’ve learned to fast forward through that, but I’d rather it were cut entirely, which would either make the show a half hour or give them time to add more teams or more tricks from the judges.  Setting that aside, the shows themselves are often very entertaining, and we get to see more female stage magicians than the other shows.  (Including one of the wizards—they’ve had two women so far.)  I enjoy seeing that the judges can get impressed when they—who know so very much about magic—see something they don’t expect.  It has much the same appeal of improv comedy:  it’s not always as funny as practiced comedy, but it’s impressive to see what skilled people can do on the relative fly.

Verdict:  The entertaining parts are entertaining, and I can fast forward through the rest.

Troy: Street Magic (SyFy, UK show, new to US.  Reality/performance)

Watched: Episodes 2 and 3

Premise:  25-year-old magician Troy Von Schiebner fools Londoners with sleight of hand, mentalism, and large-scale tricks.

Promise:  Troy is a great magician, with a lot of range.  But there are a few things about this show that I don’t enjoy so much.  First, the whole thing is tied together by Troy’s narration, which sounds both canned and smug.  Second, and more importantly, a lot of it is based on him tricking unsuspecting Londoners in hidden-camera situations.  I love the “wanna see some magic?” approach to finding marks, but hidden camera work makes me feel uncomfortable—these people didn’t sign up for being tricked, and I imagine myself in their shoes as some weirdo comes up to me and starts performing a show without my consent.  I don’t like “candid camera” prank shows either, for precisely this reason; it’s humiliating for the marks and voyeuristic for the viewer.   Troy’s marks seem to enjoy it—he’s not torturing them—but I still feel uncomfortable watching it.  Not to mention that he far more frequently tricks women than men, with that whole weird flirty vibe I mentioned in the intro.  Like many magicians, he comes across as a slightly awkward kid with enough studied suaveness to make performing work, so when he’s tricking flirtable women—even though they seem to end up enjoying it—it feels just a little creepy to me.  My final critique is that his tricks often end with him wandering off leaving the mark stranded (with their watch inside a casino game or their locker key inside the window of their shoe, to mention a couple).  I want to see those things resolved in a way that doesn’t involve playing the casino game for hours or destroying a shoe to get the things out.  Otherwise I feel even sorrier for the marks than I did before, when they were merely embarrassed.

Verdict:  He’s skilled, but I don’t enjoy watching it that much.

Close Up Kings (SyFy, new.  Reality/performance)

Watched: pilot

Premise:  Three magician friends travel to new cities to perform street magic, with each episode culminating in a large-scale trick inspired by the city.

Promise:  All three are close-up magicians (hence the name of the show), although their work often incorporates elements of mentalism and escapology.  This show has a similar canned-voiceover (and canned-patter) problem as Troy, but even worse, the weird flirt dynamic is cranked up to 11 on this one, because one of the magicians (“Loki”) is a self-professed ladies’ man.  But even if those weren’t problems, there’s a weakness in the premise of the show.  Although it’s great to have them visiting different cities and finding what’s unique about the magic of each, the gimmick overpowers the show, and it forces them to do something they’re not as good at as their big final number.  I’d rather just watch them do sleght-of-hand with each other all day (as they did in a really nice cheaters’ poker segment in the pilot).

Verdict: Not bad, exactly, but close up magic and Tony Bourdain travelogue are two great tastes that I guess don’t taste as good together as I’d hoped.

Masters of Illusion (CW, revived 2014 after a 5-year hiatus.  Performance.)

Watched:  several episodes

Premise:  Vegas-style stage magic, largely wordless.  Each performer does one big trick.  Dean Cain hosts in a minimalist way.

Promise:  This is a half-hour show, and that’s about right.  It features the sort of magic that often relies on big devices and beautiful assistants, with synthesizer music and cape flourishes.  It doesn’t try to be hip or stylish—it knows exactly what it is.  Dean Cain’s little intros and outros give you thoughts to ponder throughout the show, but otherwise it’s not about talking or thinking.  It’s about visual spectacle.  This isn’t as much my sort of stuff as the other shows, but provides nice bite-size chunks of “how’d they do that,” and that’s exactly what it sets out to do.  So it’s a success by that measure.  But—perhaps because it’s so bite-size and themeless, it also doesn’t feel compelling.  

Verdict:  A “watch it when I have room on the DVR” show…but not a “watch it every week” show. 

Penn & Teller: Fool Us (CW, UK show, new-to-US; canceled in UK but revived for US first-air In 2015.  Performance/competition).

Watched:  several episodes

Premise:  hopeful magicians perform a trick for Penn & Teller; if Penn & Teller can’t figure out out how their trick was done, they win an opportunity to open for Penn & Teller’s Vegas show.

Promise:  This show is a lot of fun.  It never felt like appointment television, but it requires the performers to be at their best and most creative, and allows Penn & Teller to be funny and entertaining in their own rights.  Of course the enjoyability of each episode depends largely on the competitors themselves, they are well chosen to be funny and often audacious, in the Penn & Teller style.   But because we don't get to know each performer very well –each gets an intro, but only performs a single trick—there isn't much to grab onto emotionally.  No through-line to carry us from show to show the way there is in elimination-tournament shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Face Off, or Last Comic Standing.  If there were, I probably would tune in more reliably.  Jonathan Ross was the emcee of the UK version; it remains to be seen whether the U.S. version will work the same without Ross at the helm, but I expect that it would not be hard to replicate the tone if the CW wants to.

Verdict:  Fun, but I wish it had more of a continuing thread.

On the DVR/Unreviewed:  too many to count, really.