To See or Not to See: Emerald City

Emerald City is the newest show that updates a classic story; in this case, it’s The Wizard of Oz. The premise has the bones of the original: a girl gets transported in a tornado to a strange new world and must find her way back home. There are, however, many differences beyond that.

The film that many people know and love–The Wizard of Oz–was itself based upon a book series. L. Frank Baum wrote his fourteen book series, the Oz books, in the early 1900s. It begins with the story we know, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and ends with Glinda of Oz. The series is bursting with countless characters and plotlines that may not be as familiar to the casual fan (stories featuring Princess Ozma, Tik-tok, Mombi, etc). NBC’s Emerald City uses elements from all of Baum’s books as the basis of the fantasy drama which makes the story of Dorothy Gale seem fresh and even more intriguing.

The Dorothy Gale (Adria Arjona) we meet is a young nurse in Kansas. She is kind yet slightly steely. We see in a prologue scene that her mother, during a terrible storm, left Dorothy, as a baby, with Aunt Em (Holly Hayes) and Uncle Henry (Pere Molina). Shortly after Dorothy’s 20th birthday, she goes to visit her birth mother only to find her shot and basically dead while a–you guessed it–tornado is raging outside. The police (but, wait, they’re bad!) and the tornado arrive, so Dorothy hops into a vacant cop car (complete with a German Shepherd police dog in the back seat) and is immediately swept up in the storm.

Dorothy arrives in Oz, but it isn’t an Oz we know. This Oz has Free Tribal people (who look like blue-faced Vikings) rather than munchkins. The witch sisters–Glinda of the North (Joely Richardson), Mistress of the Eastern Wood (Florence Kasumba), and Wicked Witch of the West (Ana Ularu)–are not so clearly good or evil (one of them even runs a brothel). The Wizard (Vincent D’Onofrio) is sinister. The scarecrow is an amnesiac Wizard’s Guard knight named Lucas (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). The yellow brick road is actually a yellow road of poppy pollen. The flying monkeys are actually drones shaped as monkeys that record things on film so that the Wizard and his staff can spy on all of Oz. And, most importantly, Oz the city is not a colorful and joyous place. Some of these modernizations make complete sense in the framework of Emerald City; others just seem like the show is trying too hard to be different and edgy.

The visuals that make up Oz are both interesting and distracting. The city of Oz is filmed in the same location as Game of Thrones is; it is so ingrained as the Game of Thrones location for King’s Landing that it is jarring to see it being used for Oz. However, the barren and bleak landscape that Dorothy, Lucas, and Toto traverse to get to Oz (reminiscent of the Lands of Mordor from J.R.R. Tolkien novels) does create a darker, more dystopian world that draws the viewer in. Then, there are very fantasy-like elements (the Prison of the Abject, Glinda’s northern, white home) that really stun. The combination of all landscapes makes the world of Emerald City feel vast and otherworldly.

Overall, NBC is trying to push limits with Emerald City. It is violent (particularly for a non-cable channel). The story has underlying gender and political themes that are emerging. They’re trying to keep the cast very diverse. It’s imaginative and wide in scope. Some of the stories already have me curious about what happens next, like Mombi (Fiona Shaw) and Tip (Jordan Loughran) or the tenuous truce between the Witches and the Wizard. It’s worth watching the show for these qualities alone.

So, while Emerald City begins shaky, there is promise in it. We look forward to continuing on Dorothy’s journey!

 

Featured Photo Credit: NBC