TV special waters down Blaine’s stunt

Isn’t everyone being a little tough on poor David Blaine?

Yes, the man is a huckster, a stubble-chinned throwback to Harry Houdini and other vaudevillian humbugs. Yes, ABC’s two-hour special “David Blaine: Drowned Alive” on Monday was a cheesy, heavily padded account of his weeklong stunt inside an 8-foot fishbowl at New York’s Lincoln Center (you could almost hear the carnival barker’s cries and smell the malarkey). And yes, the magician failed, in the end, to shatter the world record for breath-holding of 8 minutes, 58 seconds.

The length of Blaine’s apnea? Only 7 minutes, 8 seconds. Oh, is that all? How incredibly disappointing.

Blaine’s effort seems good enough to put him in the company of the world’s elite static free divers, but that’s probably not the point when you call a program “Drowned Alive” (isn’t that redundant?), film yourself jawboning with the aging stunt god Evel Knievel and have your PR people gin up a week’s worth of stories focusing on how concerned -- nay, panicked! -- your doctors are. There were so many MDs attending Blaine’s pruney flesh Monday, latecomers must’ve thought they’d stumbled upon “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Perhaps inevitably, by the time Blaine was released from a hospital Tuesday, much early media reaction was centered on his “failure” (the headline on Time magazine critic James Poniewozik’s blog posting, “Blaine Holds 7:08 of Breath; Audience Wastes Two Hours of Lives,” summed up the consensus).

Packed throng at Lincoln Center notwithstanding, audiences at home weren’t exactly blown away: “Drowned Alive” averaged a total of 9.9 million viewers, for fourth place in the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. time slot, according to early figures from Nielsen Media Research. NBC did much better with the game show “Deal or No Deal,” which led the 8 p.m. hour with an average of 15.6 million viewers. “Drowned Alive” likewise couldn’t touch Blaine’s personal best for his ABC franchise, the November 2000 special “Frozen in Time,” which logged 15.9 million viewers.

On the other (wrinkled, purplish) hand, “Drowned Alive” was up a bit from Blaine’s May 2002 pole-sitting adventure “Vertigo” (8.9 million), and the new special performed strongly among kids and reasonably well among young adults (in adults aged 18 to 49, it did a 4.1 rating/10 share, compared with Fox’s 4.8/12 combined average for “Prison Break” and “24”).

Who knows whether the hoo-ha surrounding the stunt might have proven a turnoff to some. Maybe next time the producers will take a more minimalist approach and recognize that Blaine’s oft-impressive feats are only stunted by all the carny and corny trappings of “event” TV. But don’t hold your breath.

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Channel Island is a blog about the television industry. For the latest posting, go to latimes.com/channelisland. Contact reporter Scott Collins at channelisland @latimes.com.