TVSquad

But this time, he doesn't want to do the whole "stay underwater for a week" thing beforehand.

Blaine was pretty upset that he didn't break the record, so now he wants to try it again. He feels he let fans down, so he is going over exactly what happened before he tries it again.

Personally, I'm rather impressed that he failed. And what I mean by that is, I (and I'm sure many people) thought that he would do it with no problems, because he had practiced for so long and he had succeeded in all of the other stunts. Not that it was a "trick," but just that he seems to know what he's doing and it was almost a no-brainer, inevitable that he would do it, and it would be almost an anticlimax to the whole overlong ABC special. But that fact that he actually didn't succeed shows how dangerous it was, that he was really attempting to hold his breath almost nine minutes and there wasn't any trickery involved.

I think this makes his next stunt, whatever it is, even more interesting to me. I'll be watching.

When the main emphasis of your ABC special is trying to hold your breath for longer than eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds, the special itself probably doesn't need to be longer than a half an hour. You can try to stretch it to an hour, but you'd have to add a lot of filler. If you go for two hours, then the special becomes both an endurance test for the magician and  the home audience.

Well, as you probably know by now, David Blaine did not break the record for holding one's breath underwater the longest. Granted, if he actually did spend seven days underwater and his body had taken the punishment it supposedly had, lasting for seven minutes and eight seconds was a feat in and of itself. Of course, to get to that point we had to sit through a lot of shots featuring Blaine sitting underwater among sharks and stingrays, or falling into water, or talking about water. Also, we get to hear about his "journey" to his "human aquarium" at Lincoln Center, including all the crazy stunts he had done up to that point.