So I was at the taping of the first episode and have just seen the first episode.
The taping took eight hours. It was kinda neat to see in person. However a few things stand out.
First off, the entire thing is manufactured. They had us take like a half hour to get various shots of us clapping, giving a standing ovation, shots of us agreeing with each other, blah, fake as hell. What they don't show you is that by the time the dudes eventually levitated (like 11:30-12:00 at night) half of the audience was gone having walked out at various parts of the night.
Take, for instance, the voting system. The whole thing was made to sway towards Miles Brown for some reason (nothing against him as a person/actor, it's just the show), the best performance we saw, in person at the show, was Corbin's glass and necklace routine. The lowest rated performance. (Which was not portrayed as such in the final edit, keyword:edit) At the end, they gave Criss the red envelope prior to them even knowing there would be a tie, like, right before they shot the scene with the tie. They set it up.
Not to mention, Miles had to reshoot and redo one of his routines. How could it be a fair system if they just redo something, start to finish, that they just did, start to finish.
In the final edit (eight hours of filming condensed to 42 minutes, oof) they cut parts of both performers performances, they added remarks and reactions from later in the night to earlier in the show and vise versa. To create a false storyline of events.
Then the people who were sitting around the tables for the close up parts were provided by the show, stooges, so to say, they weren't in on the tricks themselves per se, but they were directed in how to act. (You can even see in Miles routine that people are doing a specific action with their hands prior to being instructed to do so)
TL;DR: the whole show is manufactured.
As for the show as a whole, it's flat. Criss does nothing but stroke his ego the whole time, advertises his own show, which they've never really done well to begin with.
The tricks were bleh as well, you have a random table, angled down that's thicker in the back than in the front, where do you think the people came from? And later, with what I believe was the same table, where do you think they went to?
Miles had to constantly put his forearms by the dollar bill bags they're holding, you think those bags give him the shakes?
And the levitation, does anything really think there isn't a wire holding him?
He talks about taking magic to the next level and to the "extreme" yet does nothing that hasn't been done a million times by other stage magicians. Lance Burton had a routine where he, himself, vanished into a table and he turned into the very person that chased him there. Criss does generic bits, has fire shoot out, and wears make up, that's all.
Side note: they had a guy locked in a glass box filled with water, that was actually interesting and yet they cut it from the final. That's disappointing too.
Loni Love doesn't really bring anything of value to the show, which isn't her fault, she isn't in the magic community, she was meant as a stand in judge for non-magicians.
Lance Burton was awesome as always.
Eddie Griffin was amazing as well.
The show is God awful, it's in hospice, pull the plug.
