Q&A with the Deception TV Show Creators

Are you a fan of magic and illusion? You’re going to love this brand new series on ABC, coming this spring! While in LA for A Wrinkle in Time, we also screened an episode of the Deception TV show and interviewed Creator and Executive Producer Chris Fedak as well as Co-Producer David Kwong. By the way, David is also a magician and showed us a few of his tricks during the Q&A!

I was invited as media to cover this event. All opinions are my own.

Q&A with the Deception TV Show Creators

Chris Fedak and David Kwong

Chris calls the new TV drama, “Magician Impossible.” Adding, “I love shows about teams because they’re shows about family, in a way. What we’re going to be doing every week is essentially an action show with mystery and deceptions and all that cool stuff.” Speaking of David, Chris shared, “the neatest thing for me too was, at the beginning, I got to sit down with this guy. So if you ever really wonder how magic works, and he’s not going to tell you he’s not going to give away any of his secrets, because he doesn’t even give me that much.”

We asked if Jack, who plays Cameron Black (the show illusionist) had any previous experience with magic. David said, “Well we got very lucky that Jack Cutmore-Scott is very dexterous and loves magic. And he didn’t have the skills already but he worked very-very hard and continues to work with me and our New York magician Francis Menotti, and he’s always got a deck of cards on him.”

We mentioned that the Deception TV show reminded us of past series. Chris agreed saying, “I wanted to make a show that was like you’re going to sit down, and I’m going to entertain you, and this is going to be the most fun you could possibly have. And that’s where this show comes from, it was designed to be a network TV show and that’s why ABC was the perfect home for it…..there’s definitely elements of this show that have a bit of like Castle elements or Sherlock.”

Photo credit: ABC

About the Deception TV show episodes, Chris shares, “it won’t always be catching the murderer of the week, you know, we’ll do different types of episodes, we’re going to do hostage situations, bomb threats, all these different types of things and we’re always going to try to solve them in our own unique way.”

Regarding showing their hand – pun intended, David shares that they are “very respectful of magicians, so we have to be able to walk a very fine line like you’ll learn a lot about magic and the theories of magic and deception and illusion, but we’re not going to ruin tricks.” Adding, “so we had to be very-very careful to stay away from anything that would ruin anyone’s magic show. So there’s a couple of rules. If something is a hundred years old, and no one is doing that anymore, you can usually put that on screen.”

When asked who they hope gravitates to the new series, Chris said, “I did the show for everybody. I think that as David said, it’s like there is a fourteen-year-old girl who is going to be a huge magician someday and hopefully maybe she watches this show and gets excited and starts practicing.” Also mentioning, “you never really know until the show gets out there…..but I think it’s made for anybody who’s looking to have like fun watching TV Sunday nights at ten o’clock after Idol.”

(ABC/David Giesbrecht)

Who loves Scrabble or Words with Friends or Bananagrams? Check out these cool word hacks so you can win Scrabble every time, thanks to David Kwong!

More about the Deception TV Show:

When his career is ruined by scandal, superstar magician Cameron Black has only one place to turn to practice his art of deception, influence and illusion – the FBI. Using every trick in the book and inventing new ones, he will help the government catch the world’s most elusive criminals while staging the biggest illusions of his career. The series is from writer/executive producer Chris Fedak (“Chuck”) and executive producers Greg Berlanti, Martin Gero and Sarah Schechter. Illusionist David Kwong (“Now You See Me”) will co-produce.

“Deception” stars Jack Cutmore-Scott as Cameron Black, Ilfenesh Hadera as Kay Daniels, Lenora Crichlow as Dina Clark, Amaury Nolasco as Mike Alvarez, Justin Chon as Jordan Kwon, Laila Robins as FBI Agent Deakins and Vinnie Jones as Gunter Gustafsen.