[jsmith45]

See, I won't say magic can't work on television. It can work, but it does rely on a setting where the home audience can be reasonably sure the film crew is not in cahoots with the performer. This is uncommon, but in some limited scenarios like magic tricks on America's Got Talent, or say P&T's Fool Us there is little reason to cheat with video tricks, as those won't help with the judges/P&T at all, plus you risk having members of the studio audience call out the producers over such trickery.

Things like TV specials on the other hand, yeah not so much.

[gspencley]

That's a good point, and P&T have said as much when it comes to Fool Us. That having a live audience was integral to making the show work.

However, as much as I'm a fan of Fool Us, there are things that bother me about the show to the point where I will walk back how I phrased things. It's not that magic "can't work" on TV ... it's that it is always, without exception weaker on TV.

Fool Us is a show made by magicians for magicians (and I'm not even talking about Penn & Teller specifically... I'm talking about Johnny Thompson, Michael Close and others who have worked as producers to make that show what it is) and even they can't always adhere to not cutting during key moments because the nature of television forces them to have to fit varied material during a rigid time block that can change even up to moments before airing.

Then, if you pay attention when watching the show, they use other editing techniques like "risers" for example (a type of subtle sound fx added in post) during the recording which changes it in ways that makes it different than what you would experience if you saw it live.

And then there are still examples of doing stuff for TV with a live audience, that could only be done in that setting.

I'll give you an example of such a trick that has been done on these types of shows numerous times. The first time I saw it performed by Derren Brown on one of his shows I was completely brain-fried.

The trick is that the magician apparently "steals" a spectator's ability to read.

How it looks is that there is a word printed in large bold letters on a piece of paper (in Derren Brown's case it was printed on a page in a magazine). This word is shown to the wider audience and to the camera so that viewers can see it at home. What's great about this trick on TV is that while it is being shown to the selected audience member on stage, the camera can frame it so that viewers at home can verify that they are seeing the same printed word.

And yet while you can read it fine, the spectator on stage sees jibberish.

This trick has been performed on AGT at least once. It's also been performed on Fool Us by a different magician.

It's a marketed trick that you could go buy from a magic shop and perform yourself. But you won't. Why?

Because it works on optical principle that requires lighting to be very controlled.

The creator of that trick even recommends discussing the mechanics of the trick with the film production crew when doing it on television so that the camera operators and the director of photography know how to make it look as good as possible.

In other words... it's a great trick to perform on a sound stage when producing for television. But it doesn't really work that well in other environments. To be fair, you could do it with a live audience in a theatre and there are a lot of stage illusions that need controlled lighting. So it's not like this is something that needs TV specifically, though it kind of still needs cameras to "sell" the illusion so the audience can see what is being shown to the spectator on stage. And magicians love to have philosophical arguments about what constitutes "cheating." You've got magicians like me who think that the audience can't trust TV, and so we're advocates for live entertainment. And then you have magicians who take the position that TV is just another venue, and that the venue is always a tool that is available to be exploited and manipulated because that's what magicians do. But that leaves room for using everything from manipulative editing to cgi.

This is why, in my opinion, while I will walk back what I said a little and rephrase it as "magic is weaker on TV" rather than "can't work", I still think that magic is way more impressive in person... as a result of knowing what's possible on television, even when there is a live in-studio audience.