Two comedy shows feature magician characters in recent episodes, and not in the most flattering light. Perhaps this is the other side of the coin of magic becoming more popular in the zeitgeist?
The first magic cameo is in the new series on Apple TV called Margo’s Got Money Troubles. The show, based on a book of the same name, centers on a 19-year-old named Margo (Elle Fanning) who gets pregnant by her English professor and, with the help of her ex-wrestler father (Nick Offerman) and ex-Hooter’s waitress mom (Michele Pfeiffer), keeps the baby and finds a unique way to make a living.
The series is heartwarming and fun. (It’s not a show I’d recommend watching with your 80-year-old mother, which I made the mistake of doing… she ended up liking it even more than I did, though!) The magician character, named Steve Thunder, comes in the season’s fifth episode, “Flamingos.” In it, Margo’s mom is getting married in Vegas to a straight-laced pastor of a church. The couple go to a magic show and get called up onstage, where the magician subjects them to a cringe-inducing performance that includes the Baffling Bra routine, much to the consternation of the pious groom-to-be.
Hacks is a bit kinder to magicians in its two episodes where they show up. The Emmy-award winning HBO series centers on the comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder), who has a lovingly complex relationship with Deborah (Jean Smart), an older comedian who is also her boss, writing partner, and housemate. In the fifth and final season, the show’s third episode has Ava meet a very handsome man at a party. She is ecstatically supportive when she finds out he’s a sex worker. She’s much less enthused, however, when she finds out that he’s also an aspiring magician. “It’s just you’re so good at sex and what you do is so important, and what you do with magic is… less important,” Ava says. Her date, heartbroken, accuses her of magic shaming and breaks up with her.
Stills from Hacks / Courtesy of HBO
The eighth episode of Hacks also features magic, this time in the form of The Amazing Steven (Steven, it seems, is the magician name of choice for comedy TV show writers). Deborah, trying to hype up her upcoming Madison Square Garden show, partners with the illusionist and has herself raised 150 feet in the air in a glass cube. “Did someone say sorcerer?” Steven says when we first meet him. He then asks Deborah if she’s “ready to transcend the physical laws of this universe in the 2018 Merlin-award(!) winning death-defying spectacle known only as… The Cube?” Unsurprisingly, things don’t go according to plan: While Deborah is in the air, Vegas plunges into darkness because of a power outage. The Amazing Steven’s magic also closes the episode, with Ava’s selected card from hours earlier appearing in a sealed Gatorade bottle that was first offered to Deborah. It’s a long-play magic trick, and an amazing kicker, made all the better by Ava’s wondrous reaction.