Phenomenon is a reality show where illusionists will get a chance at becoming the next big thing in magic. 10 mentalists will compete to be the Phenomenon. To be honest before I saw the show, I thought they were magicians. Mentalists do not pull rabbits out of hats or saw women in half. They perform mind tricks. Guessing which card you picked or the name written on a piece of paper. Obviously these guys will be doing tricks a little more advanced than this but you get the idea. The judges for the series are Uri Geller (you know, the spoon bending guy) and Criss Angel (a.k.a., Christopher Nicholas Sarantakos). To assist the mentalists in addition to volunteers from the audience are Rachel Hunter, Ross Matthews, and Carmen Electra. Each mentalist will perform every episode. The judges comment on each performance but the decisions are completely based on the viewers votes.

On tonight’s premiere episode only four of the mentalists performed:

Ehud Segev: He did a neat trick getting Carmen Electra to think she had been touched in different places on her body, The trick was really really cool but Ehud is not the most entertaining fellow I’ve ever run across.

Jim Karol: This dude is a bit of a nut job even if he is entertaining. He threatened to stick Ross’ hand in a bear trap and then sprung the trap on his own hand while guessing the name of the celebrity Rachel wrote down. I didn’t quite get the relationship between the bear trap and guessing Jeff Goldblume’s name but whatever it was fun.

Eran Raven: Eran did a Russian Roulette trick with nail guns. This was certainly the most exciting trick of the evening. It would have been interesting to see him shoot a nail into his skull as there actually is some risk with this trick. That certainly would have surpassed Marie Osmond fainting live on Dancing With The Stars.

Gerry McCambridge: Gerry did a trick where a phone number was randomly selected from some phone books by the audience and he had it astonished the audience (not really) by having it on some cards in envelopes. This was not very exciting and Gerry doesn’t really have a great stage presence to make up for the mediocre magic.

The other 6 mentalists will perform next week on the Two-hour Special on Halloween night, October 31 (8-10 p.m. ET). After this two pf the mentalists will be going home.

Overall this show was OK. It would be fun to watch if there was nothing else on. I suspect that Pushing Daisies will probably kill it in the ratings. As the show goes on the contestants are also going to have to significantly step up the quality of their tricks if this show is to survive.

Sir Linksalot