Houdini (Season 1)

Houdini (2014) is a biographical miniseries you can watch online on iFILM. Harry Houdini grew up poor, the son of immigrants, and clawed his way through years of low-rent circus shows before handcuff escapes and locked-box routines turned him into something America had not quite seen before: a global celebrity built entirely on the spectacle of nearly dying.

Adrien Brody plays him with real edge — vain, obsessive, tender with his wife Bess (Kristen Connolly) in ways that don't come easily to him, and driven by a need to prove something that no amount of applause ever fully satisfies. Directed by Uli Edel, the two-part series follows Houdini from fairground nobodies to transatlantic stardom and his reported ties to intelligence services.

What makes the show stick is that it treats the compulsion seriously. The question is not how he did the tricks — it is why a man who had everything kept climbing into chains. Brody took home a Saturn Award for best actor in a television film for this performance. Stream Houdini (2014) online on iFILM.