Houdini & Doyle Couldn’t Escape Cancellation
Houdini & Doyle Couldn’t Escape Cancellation
Houdini might have been the world’s greatest escape artist, but not even he could free himself, or his partner, from the chains of cancellation, as the curtain drops on ITV Encore’s Houdini & Doyle.
The show, which was a UK/US/CA co-production, saw famed escape artist Harry Houdini (Michael Weston) team up with Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Stephen Mangan), to investigate inexplicable and bizarre cases for the London Metropolitan Police.
Houdini & Doyle actually didn’t perform too badly for ITV Encore in the UK, however, being a co-production, means it really has to work well in all 3 territories, and it’s ratings on Fox in the US were rather lacklustre.
Houdini & Doyle was created by David Hoselton (House, CSI: NY) & David Titcher (The Librarians, Around the World in 80 Days), and was a co-production from ITV’s Big Talk Productions, Shore Z Productions, Shaftesbury Films (Murdoch Mysteries). It lasted just one, ten episode season, before the cancellation axe came down.
Even though it was a fictional series, if a programme features real people it would be nice if attempted to get some facts correct.
Conan Doyle with an English accent, set in a time period long before they really met, a policewoman long before they existed, were all points that annoyed me. I only got through a couple of episodes.