Tin Man

Wizard of Oz puns and references are just too easy, so my title for this post is just the title of the TV show I'm reviewing, a six-hour miniseries on the Sci Fi Channel. It's a re-visioning of "The Wizard of Oz" which is based on both the original book and on the beloved MGM musical. The heroine DG (for Dorothy Gale, get it? Of course you do!) gets ripped off of her Midwest farm during a storm and finds herself in what I guess is a parallel world called the Outer Zone (O.Z.). On her quest (finding her real mother and father, as it turns out she was born in the O.Z), she has the help of Glitch, a lobotomized guy with a big zipper in his head, Cain, a cop or "tin man" who happens to have spent several years stuck in a big metal body jacket, and Raw, a somewhat cowardly beast/man. Soon they run across a shape shifter from DG's past named Toto (her childhood name for his position in the family, Tutor) who frequently turns into a dog--and who may be a spy for DG's nemesis, her wicked sister Azkadellia.

Anyone settling in for six hours of this stuff is going to be on the lookout for clever references to the movie, and in this respect, the series does not disappoint. My favorite was the presence of lions and tigers and a bear in the forest, but I also liked the flying monkeys which are tattoos on Azkadellia's chest that come to life, and the chanting guards in front of Azkadellia's castle. The effects are pretty good for a cable TV production, though the story is a bit too convoluted, especially in the middle third. Zooey Deschanel is very good as DG, and Alan Cumming, who I sometimes don't care much for, is wonderfully whimsically befuddled as Glitch. Though Glitch is obviously the Scarecrow, here the "tin man" (Neal McDonough) takes the Scarecrow's place as the character we have the most invested in; McDonough is good, though he's too cold to warm up to (though I realize his coldness is thematic, since the Tin Man didn't have a heart). Richard Dreyfuss has a thankless role as the Mystic Man (i.e., The Wizard); he has nothing much to do and the character goes nowhere. Kathleen Robertson is a bit too Disney Channel-evil as the wicked sister, but I did like Callum Keith Rennie as her main henchman. I sort of wish this had been either a little shorter, or quite a bit longer, like a 9 or 10 episode series that would have developed the characters and the situations better, but I'm glad I stayed with it.