The ratings are in, the reviews are out and there is not much applause. The audience consensus is clear: for all its gimmicks and posturing, Houdini & Doyle sucks!
The Fox TV 10-part series started off with poor ratings on its first night, March 13, and each subsequent week the audience has dropped off in droves, falling by nearly twenty-five percent.
The review in The Hollywood Reporter pretty much nails it: "Nothing really works or makes much sense in Fox's new show about Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle."
The premise is acceptable, the actors are quite competent, the producers certainly know how to make good films - or they used to, anyway. But on this series they've gotten lazy and stupid.
Last Monday, for instance. The top clip shows a séance being run by a suspicious medium named Korzha. Houdini warns all that there will be no hanky-panky while he's around. To insure this, they've hogtied the medium's shady assistant. And yet, he and the medium magically switch places!
In the second clip, we learn who it was that supervised the hogtying. Was it Houdini, the world's greatest authority on ropes and knots? No, my friends - it was Doyle! And of course the assistant wriggled free - using the "Kellar Rope Tie" - to do his dirty work.
Later, there's a girl who has seemingly drowned. Who do the writers choose to perform her lifesaving artificial respiration? Is it Doyle, the eminent medical doctor who served as a battlefield physician for the British Army? He's standing right there. But no, let's have Houdini do it instead.
The whole series is riddled with similar non-sequiturs, stupidities, howlers and dopiness. But it would be tedious to go on. Let's put this one out of its misery.
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BLACK MAGIC WOMAN V. HOUDINI & DOYLE
HOUDINI & DOYLE: DOGS DOING NOTHING IN THE NIGHT-TIME
HOUDINI AND DOYLE: THE MEN FROM BEYOND
This show shouldn't have been made!sucks is a nice way to put it
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