What’s up Angel’s sleeve?

IN an episode midway through last season of “Criss Angel: Mindfreak,” the titular magician hypnotizes an entire restaurant full of people. “I cannot be hypnotized,” he proclaimed. “Nor can anybody else that does not want to be hypnotized.”

In other words, you can’t make someone believe who doesn’t want to believe. And by extension, magic is only as good as the gullibility -- willingness to believe, that is -- of its audience.

A charismatic Greek boy from Long Island, N.Y., with a hint of an accent, Angel looks a bit like the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis but brawnier. As professional magicians go, he’s an unqualified stud. (An able mentalist, he’s convinced Minnie Driver and, lately, Cameron Diaz of his romantic charms.) He’s also an unqualified success, having been awarded the title of Magician of the Year several times. He’s become something more than a cult figure too, already the subject of a vicious and deft parody on MTV’s “Human Giant” sketch comedy show.

None of this changes that Angel’s stuff is magic’s bread and butter -- making things vanish, sawing things in two, hypnotizing people, levitating, neato card tricks. His show takes these tricks one step further, packaging them for a television audience, a feat that involves different sleights of technique than doing them live. Though predictable -- Angel never fails -- “Mindfreak” is successful enough television to make you wonder who’s getting duped: the stooges being filmed, the viewers at home or both.

Each episode is structured around one epic trick; last season, they included walking on water for the length of a pool and escaping from a straitjacket while being dragged behind a boat. One of the show’s integrity strategies is that it’s structured like a documentary, with footage from pre-taped interviews with Angel’s worried-looking associates and “experts” (hello, Richard Kaufman, editor of Genii magazine) commenting on Angel’s routinely ridiculous plans. Additionally, each performance is witnessed by spectators to cement credibility. It doesn’t always work. In some episodes, the seams of Angel’s tricks have been visible, and quick Google searches can dig up several explanations for Angel’s stunts, a few of them plausible.

Look! Up in the sky!

MESSAGE boards will doubtless be abuzz after the premiere episode of the third season of “Mindfreak” (A&E;, 10 p.m. Tuesday), in which the illusionist spends several weeks preparing for a preposterous feat: levitating above Las Vegas’ Luxor hotel in the beam of light that emanates from the top of the pyramid-shaped building. (A guess: hologram?)

Even for Angel, the episode is a hard sell. He dedicates his performance to his late father -- “My dad’s gonna look down upon that light, see me floating in it and realize that, ‘You know what, you did good, Criss, you made me proud’ ” -- and splices in old family video footage (something he’s done before -- “art” and “emotion” are words Angel uses a great deal when discussing his work). There’s a physicist consulting with Angel’s team as well as endless reminders that the Luxor light is searing hot, 42.2-billion candlepower strong. And to bolster credibility, during the levitation -- which is visually spectacular, if eyebrow-raising -- footage from the show’s cameras is interspersed with additional film captured by spectators: Kristen from Texas, Savannah from California, Starr from Arizona, and so on.

Or maybe that’s “spectators.” “Mindfreak” is often accused of using actors as dupes, lending Angel’s tricks an air of spontaneity that they actually lack. It should be said, though, that if his stooges are actors, they’re convincingly dull and average. Except for the ones who are actually actors and musicians, and so on: using celebrities as witnesses to his tricks gives Angel a front of credibility. (Why would they risk their brand integrity to further Angel’s ruses?) And stars have given Angel some of his most memorable moments. In his first season, he drove Mandy Moore’s car blindfolded through the streets of Los Angeles; last season, he took a group of B- and C-listers to a haunted hotel and subjected them to a seance (Deborah Gibson and Three 6 Mafia -- together at last!).

Some of his nonceleb tricks are flabbergasting too. In one episode last season, he predicted the outcome of a short-track car race. Or appeared to. If indeed “what you see is what you get,” as Angel is so fond of saying, then abstracted one step, the show itself is the illusion; there can be no trick without the medium.

So with that in mind, do you believe?