HOUDINI & DOYLE: DOGS DOING NOTHING IN THE NIGHT-TIME

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle & Harry Houdini: friends, foes & geniuses in real life.

“Based on true events,” they tell us. If only it were….

So our question is: why use rich historical characters if you intend to completely obliterate their colorful, interesting history? If you do so on the grounds of artistic license - fine, but you need to replace it with something good, like they did on Elementary and Sherlock.

Houdini & Doyle, a new miniseries on Fox, features two fascinating real-life geniuses slogging through a plot from hunger. We don’t get the deductive, crime-solving genius of Sherlock Holmes or his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. And we don’t get the magical ghostbusting genius of Houdini, the man who walked through walls. The best he does here is pick a few locks. Pretty sure we saw that on Charlie’s Angels, and MacGyver did it without paperclips or lockpicks.

What’s the point, unless the fiction is actually entertaining and not just another schlockmeister police story?

Fictional characters, just showing up for work.

There’s a third character in Fox’s mix, a policewoman named Adelaide. She’s both fictional and fake. The series is set in 1901: there were no actual policewomen in England until 1914. She’s portrayed as a waify, sensitive girl who until now has been stuck in the basement of the London Metropolitan Police using her touch-typing skills. She’s already being accused of sleeping with Houdini.

The first policewomen in England were anything but shy, man-hungry waifs: they were hefty, wealthy lesbians with titles of nobility. They worked not in London but in a small village near a large military base. Their job was not to solve crimes but to patrol the local girls to keep them from falling into prostitution. Surely that would have made for a far more intriguing character than poor Adelaide, who is already from episode one being slimed with every cliché in the Hollywood writer’s douchebag.

England's first policewoman,  Edith Smith, in real life

Conan Doyle, the distinguished physician who created the immortal Sherlock Holmes, is portrayed as a holy-rolling spiritualist whose hobbies are writing and medicine. His interest in crime is, on Fox, restricted to crimes involving ghosts. He is depicted as an enemy of the police who is only able to get involved in their cases because he knows people in high places. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In reality Doyle was deeply involved in a number of high profile criminal cases, and was often consulted as a criminologist by the police. He was a one-man Innocence Project: his work in exonerating falsely-convicted prisoners led to the establishment of the British Court of Criminal Appeal. Surely this would be a far stronger premise for a series than the hackneyed “damned amateurs” line taken by Fox. But, hey - we don’t like it ’cause it happens to be true!

Paging Scully & Mulder!

As for Houdini - he comes out the best of the three. It’s not a bad characterization: he’s bright, he’s brash, but we’re disappointed to see that the magic they’ve picked for him is very routine, boring stuff. What he is not is interesting and appealing, and neither is Conan Doyle. This definitely does not square with what we know about both these men, who were truly fond of each other until their unfortunate split over the supernatural. Let’s hope future episodes get over their own schlocky ancestry and pick up on the real charm of their characters.

Update: Episode Two compounds the felony. The writers seem to have confused Houdini and Conan Doyle. In real life, Houdini was crazy in love with his wife Bess; Conan Doyle had the alcoholic, absent father and was in love with another woman while his wife languished with tuberculosis. On Fox, it's just the opposite: "Hey, let's be creative and do everything backwards!" 

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