Derren Brown: Secret opened on Broadway to rave reviews. It's a fantastic show, held together by the psychological illusionist's charming patter and dazzling skill —but since Secret is his first Broadway show, many of his audience members might emerge from their viewings wondering where the hell that nice man with the magic brain came from, and why they've never seen him around before.
The answers to both of those questions are, in order, Britain and the difficulty of translating certain bands of fame between the British and American landscapes of celebrity. He's famous over there, he's not as famous here (yet), and the only advantage to that is now any new American fans can experience the joy and terror of his 20-year television career for the first time.
Here are the Derren Brown shows you should watch if you're a new American fan. There's way more, but it's a start. All links to episodes or clips are from Brown's YouTube channel.
As a warning: it gets weird. Really, really weird.
The Push
Watching The Push on Netflix was my first experience with Derren Brown’s work and the single most anxiety-inducing hour and a half I have ever spent voluntarily. I am physically incapable of stopping myself from luring my friends over to my apartment with the promise of brunch and revealing that they’re actually here to watch The Push with me for the third time this month. It’s just that good.
In The Push, Brown poses a terrifying question: can he, given complete control of a subject’s environment, manipulate an innocent into committing murder? If you think the answer is “no, because that’s insane and we live in a society,” you’ve already missed the point.
Miracle
Brown’s past as an Evangelical Christian is a well-documented part of his public narrative — he rejected the church in his twenties and is now an atheist. Miracle is a live show born out of his previous work exposing faith healers (seen in the 2005 special Miracles for Sale), during which it’s easy to imagine he recognized the godless hustle and declared amateur hour officially over.
Miracle is all fun and games until Brown actually starts healing the sick and curing the vision-impaired members of his live audience, at which point the mounting tension between wanting to believe and knowing it’s all a trick becomes truly exhilarating.
For Secret or Miracle fans who want to see more of Brown's live shows, his 2011 tour Svengali (a personal favorite featuring a spooky co-star) is also up on his Youtube channel, as well as 2005's Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Sacrifice
The third, but hopefully not the last, Netflix special from Derren Brown is Sacrifice, which operates as a sort of inverse to The Push. This time, Brown takes an ordinary racist Floridian (who swears he’s not a racist, he just thinks Central and South American immigrants are invading his country...glad that’s cleared up) and uses a combination of classical conditioning, elaborate setups, and a heavy dose of Derren Brown-y mind games to see if his subject could possibly learn enough empathy to lay down his life for a member of the group he hates.
From an ideological standpoint, Sacrifice is one of Brown’s weaker specials, but the lengths to which he goes in the attempt to make his subject a marginally better person are impressive as always. Racism: the one problem magic can’t quite solve.
Trick or Treat, “Kitten”
After the success of his first two TV series Mind Control and Trick of the Mind in 2000 and 2004, respectively, Derren Brown continued his early career as a television mentalist with 2005’s Trick or Treat. In each episode Brown and his goatee offered his subject a choice of a “Trick” card or a “Treat” card and provided them with a corresponding experience. Thing is, the younger Brown’s interpretation of the cards is flexible at best and completely satanic at worst.
In the episode titled “Kitten,” Brown offers a woman (who picked a Treat! Card!) £500 if she does not press a button hooked up to an electrified cage containing an adorable kitten. If she presses the button, the cat dies and she gets no money. Not to spoil but this episode keeps me up at night. Often.
Apocalypse, Parts One and Two
A common thread in Brown’s mid-career-to-current work is straight up traumatizing people until they learn a valuable lesson, like what would happen if Aesop ran escape rooms in hell. Apocalypse stars Steven, an unmotivated schmuck who takes his life for granted. What would you imagine is the best way for Steven to rediscover his joie de vivre? If you guessed “make him think everyone he loves is dead and simulate ragnarok” then congratulations, you’re a maniac! Just like Derren Brown.
With the help of Steven’s family, Brown orchestrated a long-term campaign to make only Steven believe the world might end, then faked a meteor crash with movie-grade pyrotechnics, and forced the lad to survive a fully choreographed zombie apocalypse. Apocalypse aired as a two-part special that remains some of Brown’s most gripping work to date.
Hero at 30,000 Feet
Similar to Apocalypse in theme if not scope is Hero at 30,000 Feet, which Brown has named as one of his all-time career highlights. Matt, the subject of Hero, has a paralyzing fear of flying among other disruptive anxieties. To help Matt, Brown surveils him for 30 days, hypnotizes him in his sleep a bunch, ties him up in a straight jacket and lays him on some train tracks like an old-timey cartoon villain (wait, what?), and finally puts Matt in a position to take control of his life by doing something truly heroic.
Hero at 30,000 Feet is genuinely touching and features Brown’s impressive understanding of hypnosis and social conditioning, but it also makes me wonder if England has therapists, like, at all. If they do, do they ever wish Derren Brown would let them have a crack at these guys first?
Derren Brown: The Experiments, “Gameshow”
One of Derren Brown’s common strategies for picking his subjects is to bring them in to audition for a game show and summarily reject them — that way they don’t suspect his influence when he comes along later to either fix or destroy their lives, depending on his mood. In this episode of Derren Brown: The Experiments, Brown turned the trick around by actually pulling a game show together, for real this time.
If you believe that, you haven’t been paying attention to a single goddamn thing I’ve written.
For drama’s sake I won’t reveal what “Gameshow’s” deal is, but keep in mind that if Derren Brown invites you to a game there’s no way to know who is actually playing.
The Heist
Reforging England's useless sons might seem like a full time job, but Derren Brown always makes time for a little crime on the side. Under the guise of hosting a motivational seminar, Brown attempted to program middle-management types to respond to a series of triggers in the hopes that they would rob a security truck of 100,000 real British pounds, at gunpoint. The Heist also peels back some of Brown’s audition process, as the special begins with a larger group of potential felons that gradually disqualify themselves as he runs them through a series of surreptitious tests.
Derren Brown: The Experiments, “The Assassin”
Can Derren Brown make a member of the public shoot Stephen Fry without the assassin realizing he’s doing it? Jesus Christ, do you really want to know? It’s starting to sound like I’m making these up but I promise I’m not.
All of this to say this if Secret blew your mind, there's way more where that sense of abject wonder came from. Whether your conclusion after watching enough of Derren Brown's work is "what a talented man with a fascinating hair journey" or more likely "the devil is real and oh God, he's English," his foray onto American stages bodes well for shifting the way we experience stage magic as a culture. Even if we are two decades behind the curve.
