Houdini & Doyle

PC Adelaide Stratton (Rebecca Liddiard), Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan)

Playing fast and loose with history, Houdini & Doyle is an historical detective procedural with a paranormal twist, set roughly in the period of the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and many other works, including the 'serious' ones that he mistakenly believed were the ones he would be remembered for, and American escapologist and showman Harry Houdini. It's an obvious choice really, since the two men were close friends and later rivals, falling out over their diametrically opposed views on the paranormal: Houdini becoming a dogged debunker of spiritualists, media and psychics, while Doyle increasingly hewed to a fairly generalised belief in 'something'.

Houdini & Doyle gives us both men at the height of their powers in London, 1901. Doyle has killed off his millstone, Holmes (a decision which everyone seems to have an opinion on,) and Houdini is the toast of the town and an inveterate ladies' man. Of course, Holmes was written out in 1893 and by the time he became famous Houdini's constant stage assistant was his wife, but why let fact get in the way of a good story. On that front, when the two celebrities start to interest themselves in police cases with a potential supernatural twist as part of their drive to settle their dispute over the existence of the paranormal, they are assigned as liaison Constable Adelaide Stratton, a non-nonsense female officer determined to be taken seriously. In real life, the first female PC was Sophia Stanley in 1919.

So, it's not accurate, is what I'm saying, and I think it's inaccurate in a way that doesn't do it any favours. Unmarrying Houdini is supposed to create an opposition with tragic family man Doyle (I have no idea if his tuberculitic first wife spent the last several years of her life unresponsive, while Doyle tried to contact her unconscious spirit via media,) but also practically forces a romantic tension with Stratton which does neither character many favours. It also turns Houdini into a mummy's boy on an almost Norman Batesian scale, and for some reason leaves out the real-life soap opera of Doyle's 'other woman', his future second wife towards whom he maintained a chaste love until his first wife's death.

So far, the three leads are fairly even, even if one of them doesn't get to be in the credits, and that's all to the good. Doyle is imaginative and observant, Houdini questioning and pragmatic, and Stratton thorough and determined. It would be easy for Doyle to become the butt of the series, especially as maintaining the central dispute more or less requires that every case turns out not to be paranormal. Two episodes in, the show's determinedly skeptical stance is probably its greatest weakness, turning the central conceit into a huge red herring.

There may be a follow up at the end of season 1, but no episodic reviews on this one.