The game is afoot for TV’s unlikely new detective duo: ‘Houdini & Doyle’

First impressions, like an ingenious magic trick, can be deceiving.

You hear the title of Fox’s new mystery-adventure series, Houdini & Doyle, and you might think it’s a joke.

Maybe it’s an idea for an absurd sketch-comedy routine: Harry Houdini, legendary illusionist and escape artist, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, as a mismatched TV detective duo.

But Houdini & Doyle is on the level.

The series, starring Michael Weston and Stephen Mangan as unlikely partners, premieres at 8 p.m. Monday. And once you look into the shared history of these two extraordinary men, you discover that this crazy mashup of characters isn’t as farfetched as it first seems.

“We take a few liberties and we fudge history a little by making these two guys solve crimes together,” says Weston, who plays Houdini. “But the premise is rooted in something that’s very real.

“Houdini and Doyle were good friends in real life, even though they disagreed about almost everything, particularly when it came to what brought them together in the first place, which was spiritualism and the supernatural.”

One of these men was a true believer in spiritualism and was determined to find proof of life beyond the grave. The other was a total cynic about such matters.

The counterintuitive twist was that Doyle, whose famous literary sleuth stressed rational thinking and deductive reasoning, was the one who took the leap of faith.

Houdini, on the other hand, even though he lived in a world of magic, was the skeptic who actually went on a personal crusade to discredit phony psychics and mediums.

The show takes this dynamic — famous friends who share an interest in the paranormal, although from decidedly different perspectives — and runs with it. That’s why the early-1900s-era mysteries in Houdini & Doyle all have a supernatural slant.

In the premiere, Houdini, Doyle and Adelaide Stratton (Scotland Yard’s first female constable, played by Rebecca Liddiard) investigate the murder of a nun. Eyewitness testimony from another sister would make it an open-and-shut case, if not for the fact that the accused woman died six months earlier.

Subsequent cases involve a homicidal 12-year-old who claims he’s avenging his own murder during a past life and a faith healer whose abilities may have allowed him to take a life.

“There’s something in us as human beings that makes us feel the need to answer questions about the supernatural and the afterlife,” Weston says. “We want to know the unknowable and we want to define the indefinable — and we’d like to do it as neatly as detectives wrapping up a case.

“The problem is, as soon as you wrap one thing up, there always seems to be a question mark about something else.”

Weston confesses that he didn’t know much about Houdini or magic and he was never much of a Sherlock Holmes reader either. What drew him to the series was the involvement of two other men, executive producers David Shore and David Hoselton.

“I worked with them when they were making House,” says Weston, who had a recurring role as private investigator Lucas Douglas. “They have a great ability to combine fun and wit and clever banter with procedural structure and give you something different, deeper and more complex.”

It has been fun to wear Houdini’s handcuffs, the actor says, because the character “has a sense of mischief and playfulness, but he’s also a little cocky and too self-assured.”

Now, after completing the 10-episode season, Weston is just wild about Harry and his magic.

“Learning to perform magic on the fly was very hard,” he says. “I gained an immediate respect for anyone who has mastered the illusions that we do in the show.

“I worked with this guy, Danny Hunt, who is a Houdini escapologist. He is a magician who puts his own take on Houdini’s classic escapes. He helped me a lot, just so I could at least look like I know what I’m doing.

“I’m still a total amateur. The only things I can do are very rudimentary. But I hope to pursue this a lot more as I continue.”

This story was originally published April 29, 2016 at 1:38 PM with the headline "The game is afoot for TV’s unlikely new detective duo: ‘Houdini & Doyle’."