The TV Zone

We're off to see the Wizard, again. In its December cable miniseries "Tin Man," Sci Fi takes another pass at that modern American myth created a hundred years ago by L. Frank Baum.

We've all seen "The Wiz"and TV movie remakes and concert versions, none coming close to the magic of Judy Garland's classic 1939 movie musical "The Wizard of Oz." That tube perennial and DVD fave continues to embody the tale for most everybody. But the makers of Sci Fi's elaborate six-hour epic think "the problem with previous attempts was that they haven't reinvented the world to the point where it could stand on its own," cowriter Steven Long Mitchell told TV critics this morning. "The movie's out there and that's what people really know," so imitation won't cut it. Yet, said his writing partner Craig Van Sickle ("The Pretender"), it's the "iconic nature of the characters" we've all embraced for decades that actually "allows itself to be reinvented" through freshened-up details.

Sci Fi's press release promises a "darkly menacing world" with a thoroughly modern population of "cowardly psychics, brain-drained inventors," an ex-cop who lost his heart witnessing the torture killing of his wife, aboriginal people clinging to their threatened culture, and a dog/human shape-shifter (Toto, too!). It's a bizarre parallel universe called The O.Z. (Outer Zone) into which a tornado hurls star Zooey Deschanel's ordinary contemporary waitress named DG. (Dorothy Gale, perhaps?)

Sounds weird -- and potentially disastrous (still in post-production, "Tin Man" wasn't screened for critics) -- but the builders of this semi-fantasy/semi-gritty universe were certainly waxing lyrical as they discussed it. "All the characters are so rich and different and modern, and yet old-fashioned," said title player Neal McDonough, a critical fave from NBC's late, lamented "Boomtown" and "Band of Brothers" on HBO. "This is probably my favorite thing I've ever done," McDonough said. "I'm so damn proud of being a part of this," no easy deal since an Oz show "was the first thing I ever did in high school and the movie is a near and dear thing to my heart."

The new miniseries "tips its hat to the original book," said director Nick Willing (he did NBC's 1999 "Alice in Wonderland" with Martin Short and Whoopi Goldberg), "yet it creates its own world." The resulting special-effects-fueled amalgam melds "the flavor of a nostalgic world and a half-remembered world gone by" with a modern approach that makes it "a strange, grungy fantasy," Willing said.

Wicked witch/O.Z. sorceress portrayer Kathleen Robertson (Clare on "Beverly Hills 90210") extolled how "Tin Man" comes at the tale from what she called "a psychological way and a character-based way. Why would someone be this evil? We approached it from the inside out. It's about understanding why the characters did what they did, what their hopes were and what their dreams were."

Director Willing contends that harks back to "the emotional idea of the original book, that we have inside us all already what we're searching for." Despite "Tin Man's" flashy effects and elaborate costumes, "what sets this apart," he said, was the ambition to "try and create a modern version of the original idea. At its heart, this is a film about simply very pure values that are still important today."

[Above: Neal McDonough, Zooey Deschanel, Raoul Trujillo, Alan Cumming in Sci Fi photo by Alan Markfield.]