Grown-up, mopey cop Dorothy’s ‘Emerald City’ is not worth a visit
NBC’s latest take on ‘Oz’ makes mistakes of earlier projects
Here’s an idea: What if, instead of re-imagining old stories, Hollywood spent more time imagining new ones?
Yes, these cultural rehabs can occasionally bear welcome fruit, when an artist uses a familiar work to show us something we had missed. But too often the impetus is simply the commercial benefit of using a pre-sold title to attract viewers — and far too often the method is to just take the original story and make it darker, drearier and more violent. And so you get NBC’s Emerald
City (Friday, 9 ET/PT, out of four), a blighted 10-episode effort that films The Wizard of Oz through a Game of Thrones video game lens. L. Frank Baum’s series of children’s books, of course, have survived multiple adaptations and manipulations, some good (MGM’s 1939 classic and Broadway’s Wicked); some bad (the movie version of The Wiz, Syfy’s Tin Man); and some indifferent (pretty much every animated version). It will also survive Emerald City, though there are a few moments when that triumph seems a bit touch and go. In a repeat of the big-screen
Wiz’s fatal mistake, Dorothy is now a mopey grownup (a cop played by Adria Arjona) rather than a resilient child, who insists she’s nothing special and wishes she were simply “more.” One key to self-improvement, she thinks, is visiting the birth mother who left her with Auntie Em and Uncle Henry — but while there, she stumbles into both a conspiracy
and a tornado. We’re no longer in Kansas anymore, but we’re not quite in the Oz we know, either. Instead, we’re in the land where the Munchkins are an aboriginal-like tribe who don’t speak English (unlike everyone else, not that Dorothy registers this linguistic oddity) and the witches are subservient to the Wizard (Vincent D’Onofrio, giving a performance his fans will recognize).
The Wizard has outlawed magic, much to the dismay of Joely Richardson’s power-hungry Glin- da and Ana Ularu’s drugged-up, brothel-running West. His power stems from having conquered The Beast Forever, but there are hints that the beast is returning, and Dorothy had something to do with it.
Or not. It’s hard to keep the story straight, as new and old characters mingle and the mostly anemic performances weaken the show’s hold on our attention. Still, within a few episodes battle lines are drawn and the seeds of mysteries are planted — leaving you to decide early on whether you think the lines are worth following and the seeds worth nurturing. There are moments in Emerald
City that are involving and scenes that are visually appealing, but none that are particularly distinctive. Everything about this city seems to have been borrowed from other lands: a little Lord of the Rings here, a little Grimm’s
Fairy Tales there. Oh sure, you can play spot the influences in Judy Garland’s Oz as well — but you also get the great joy of seeing those influences coalesce into something fresh and totally delightful.
Just try to imagine anyone watching Emerald City saying the same.