‘Emerald City’: Game of Groans
L. Frank Baum created a rich and still-vital mythology with his Oz books, the most popular manifestation of which was, of course, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland. Starting Friday night, NBC does its best to dull that vitality with its “event series” Emerald City.
The 10-episode series turns Dorothy into a morose nurse played by Adria Arjona. A tornado strikes her Kansas town, so she seeks refuge in a cop car and winds up in Oz with a German shepherd police dog as her version of Toto. Instead of the brightly hued magical land of the Judy Garland movie as summoned up by director Victor Fleming, Emerald City transports us to a barren, cold landscape via show director Tarsem Singh. It’s basically a cut-rate rip-off of the Game of Thrones exteriors.
We soon begin to see the method behind this show’s storytelling: If there’s a way to pump more pretentious gas into the story, Emerald City will find it. It turns Baum’s scarecrow hung in a field into a Christ figure dying on a wooden cross. Oh, puh-leeze. Once rescued by Dorothy, he turns out to be a hunk played by Oliver Jackson-Cohen, with television’s requisite fashionable chin stubble.
Related: ‘Wizard of Oz’ Superfan’s Memorabilia Collection Worth Nearly Half a Million Dollars
The Wizard of Oz is played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who plays him as a huffing, puffing egomaniac without much soul, rather similar to what we imagined D’Onofrio’s Det. Goren was probably like when he went home after closing a Law & Order: Criminal Intent case.
You’d do a lot better to read Baum’s Oz series. Move beyond the first volume, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and you’ll find a whole new, complex world in the subsequent novels — it’s marvelously inventive stuff, wholly original, unlike the patchwork of various TV shows and movies that’s stitched together to form Emerald City.
NBC has scheduled Emerald after Grimm, another bleak-ization of fairy tales. Good programming. Lousy shows.
Emerald City airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on NBC.
