Spring is a magical time of year, full of new life and growth. Among the things that come alive are the pilots that didn’t convince the suits they could make it past fall sweeps. Nearly all of them are destined to be short lived, most limited to a single season if they’re even allowed to finish (666 Park Avenue, Veritas: The Quest). And when they are granted a second season, that’s usually the end of the road (Secrets & Lies, The Real O’Neals). The networks are replacing shows you may or may not have grown to love with something new that will likely be deleted from your brain during your next REM cycle. On that note, we look at ABC’s Deception.
Shark Tank just wrapped it’s 9th season and The Bachelor has given away his last rose, leaving room for a new drama to trail behind the revival of American Idol. The reason this is at all significant is that Deception truly feels like a bad Fox drama. On the same network as Shondaland, it feels like it wants to be on TGIT but isn’t cool enough to get a seat at that table. It never tries to be sexy, thankfully, because if it can’t pull off an interesting drama, I don’t even want to fathom what its bedroom etiquette looks like.
Cameron Black (Jack Cutmore-Scott) is a famous magician, with TV specials of his impossible tricks. Early in the pilot it is revealed that he has a Prestige-esque secret when his unknown identical twin is framed for murder, revealing one of magic’s biggest secrets to the world. This would be a great hook, but the show unfortunately decides to keep going.
Kay Daniels (Ilfenesh Hadera) is an FBI agent who has spent years tracking one of the world’s biggest drug lords. When an airplane blows up in front of her eyes, Cameron Black just happens to turn up to show her that the plane was actually swapped through a secret door in the hangar and that the crime boss got away. Throughout the episode, Black keeps butting into her case, sometimes in disguise, like a Gene Parmesan without Lucille One’s classic reaction.
My biggest problem with Deception is that it never feels grounded in reality. While it reveals secrets to some of the best magic tricks, it also fails to set limitations on its characters. Sherlock Holmes has traveled the world and is able to deduce a person’s travels by tiny details, such as the type of stitching on a man’s tweed coat, but his hubris often gets the better of him at some point. Cameron Black, while talking to someone on a cell phone, is somehow able to deduce the precise airport the caller is in based on the music playing in the background and the “acoustics” through that marvelous speaker phone. Unless Black is keeping psychic powers a secret, there’s no scenario in which that is plausible, or even plausibly impossible.
As a kid who grew up watching Lance Burton and Belinda TV specials, I really wanted to like Deception. It has a great premise, but it’s poorly executed and the characters all feel flat. It will be one impressive trick if this show is even allowed to finish its short season. And perhaps the most unbelievable aspect is that this magician still has TV specials in 2018. They missed a synergy moment to say it was a streaming special on Disney’s upcoming over the top platform, where this show will likely be hidden in the dark corner of a server where nobody will ever find it. The tagline for Deception should be “Now you see it, now you don’t,” because it will be here and gone as fast as a slight-of-hand magic trick.
Deception airs Sunday, March 11th, at 10:00 pm on ABC.