Get the latest gossip
Did I Dream This Gritty Wizard of Oz Miniseries?
Syfy’s Tin Man feels like being transported back to a wilder, riskier era of TV.
The show “has everything” in exactly the way you might imagine Stefon describing an underground Lower East Side nightclub: Alan Cumming as a brilliant yet brainless scientist whose empty skull sports a silver zipper down the middle; Neal McDonough as a former city police officer, colloquially referred to as a “Tin Man,” hell-bent on avenging his murdered family; Richard Dreyfuss as a stuttering fortune teller who first appears in the form of a giant holographic head in the middle of a seedy dive bar whose inhabitants wouldn’t look out of place in a Star Wars movie; Beverly Hills, 90210 ’s Kathleen Robertson as a sexy villainess named Azkadellia whose chest tattoos transform into a flock of mangy winged monkeys. Given all this, it’s no surprise that the series was criticized at the time for being “too dark” in its treatment of Wizard of Oz lore — though, after ten years of “gritty” adaptations of other media, Tin Man ’s grimy steampunk aesthetic and parade of tragic backstories feel downright cheerful. It is an exemplar of a time when a book whose characters serve as flat political or moral metaphors can be transformed into a science-fiction yarn about magical kingdoms in other dimensions populated by leather-clad henchmen and grimly heroic oddities, where a desire to escape from your sepia-toned small town is more than just a dream.
Or read this on VULTURE