Another Super Duo: Houdini and Doyle

If you have had enough of superheroes and find you are looking for something a little more real, you might want to take a look at Fox's new show Houdini & Doyle.  The new series starts tonight and as the name suggests it starts with the real friendship between escape artist Harry Houdini and author Arthur Conan Doyle, but that is where it ends.  Fox will say it is "inspired by" the friendship, but that is quite a stretch.  It is basically a Victorian-era Supernatural where the duo work with Scotland Yard to solve a variety of mysterious crimes.  Here is a clip showing what you can expect.  

You can check out Wikipedia for more on the actual relationship, but this is what I found:

Doyle was friends for a time with Harry Houdini, the American magician who himself became a prominent opponent of the Spiritualist movement in the 1920s following the death of his beloved mother. Although Houdini insisted that Spiritualist mediums employed trickery (and consistently exposed them as frauds), Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers—a view expressed in Doyle's The Edge of the Unknown. Houdini was apparently unable to convince Doyle that his feats were simply illusions, leading to a bitter public falling out between the two. A specific incident is recounted in memoirs by Houdini's friend Bernard M.L. Ernst, in which Houdini performed an impressive trick at his home in the presence of Conan Doyle. Houdini assured Conan Doyle the trick was pure illusion and that he was attempting to prove a point about Doyle not "endorsing phenomena" simply because he had no explanation. According to Ernst, Conan Doyle refused to believe it was a trick.

 It is an interesting way to sell another police procedural and I may tune in for an episode or two, yet I expect Supernatural and Penny Dreadful will give me my dose of ghost hunting without the need to play with history.