Fox Gives ‘Houdini & Doyle’ a 10-Episode Series Order
Houdini and Doyle, a supernatural crime drama developed for the small-screen by Sony Pictures TV has just been handed with a 10-episode series by Fox for the US, along with the UK's ITV and Canada's Shaw Media.
Created by David Titcher, David Shore and David Hoselton, Houdini and Doyle is loosely based on the unlikely but true-to-life friendship between the illusionist Harry Houdini and the creator of the "Sherlock Holmes" fiction books Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As Deadline describes the show, "In Houdini And Doyle, two of the great characters of the 20th century -Houdini, master magician, escape artist and paranormal debunker, and Doyle, creator of the world's greatest detective and a paranormal aficionado - grudgingly join forces to investigate crimes with a supernatural slant. Although they're both rich, famous and brilliant, they're the original odd couple, with Houdini believing in nothing, Doyle in everything." Put another way, io9 said "Houdini Scully and Doyle is Mulder in a new Victorian X-Files show."
Houdini and Doyle met and became fast friends during the 1920s. In his book "Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini," the biographer Christopher Sandford describes the pair's unique friendship as "sometimes macabre, sometimes comic, and fundamentally human, underpinned by their shared longing for lost loved ones and their adventures in the world of Spiritualism - at the time, a world with unmatched popular allure."
Like X-Files' Scully and Mulder, Houdini and Doyle too had a falling out. Ironically, it was Houdini, the career showman who made his living fooling people, was just too much of a skeptic, while Doyle, the highly educated doctor of medicine, was too much of a believer. Houdini was even unable to convince Doyle that his own feats of magic were simply illusions. Doyle seemed to have convinced himself that Houdini somehow possessed supernatural powers.
Hoselton wrote the script for Houdini And Doyle from a story he developed with Titcher, and he will also serve as showrunner. The two will executive produce the show with Shore.