The answer is: yes, but not very many people.
So I guess my question is, who’s paying for the show, then?
Let’s start at the beginning.
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4 Million Watched the Pilot
Fool Us began life in 2011 as a single straight-to-air pilot on ITV in the UK. The concept was simple, fool Penn & Teller and win a trophy and a trip to Vegas. Penn & Teller are pretty famous and well-respected in the UK. They’d been on the Jonathon Ross show several times — Ross is a big magic fanboy. It all looked positive.
Penn and Teller had been quite outspoken about how much they disliked reality shows, explicitly judging/competition shows. Some found it odd that they’d spent their career unwinding the idea that being fooling was the crux of good magic only to judge magic on foolingness alone.
When rehearsing the pilot, they needed to decide if the host would be on the side of the magicians or the side of Penn and Teller. They had to figure out how to give up the fact they knew how a trick worked without revealing the secret or upsetting the audience by not giving anything away.
Jonathan Ross hosted the pilot that pulled enough viewers to get commissioned as an eight-part series.
3 Million Watched Series One
Production recorded all eight episodes over ten days.
You’ll notice Penn, Teller and Host always wear the same outfit throughout the season. They do this because they don’t know which magicians will be in each episode until they reach the edit—choosing then to chop things up so that there’s an even distribution of fooler, big tricks, and impressive sleight of hand in each episode.
The producers announced in 2012 that ITV had cancelled the show, despite averaging millions more viewers than a show at that time would typically pull.
Two years later, the CW network in the States ran the ITV-produced first season over the summer. The ratings impressed them, and they ordered a second season of original episodes to air in 2015.
2 Million Watched Series Two
Some things changed for season two: notably, the show was now shot at the Penn and Teller Theatre in Las Vegas. Recording there made sense now that the show is technically a US production. The second significant change, and a knock-on effect from the change in shooting location, was that the prize of a trip to Vegas vanished. Magicians were already in Vegas performing on the big stage. Now, the award became the trophy and the achievement of fooling P & T.
