Did I Dream This Gritty Wizard of Oz Miniseries?

Before streaming platforms forever altered the way we watch and consume entertainment, quantifying everything into easy-to-search, algorithmically managed apps, we used to just stumble across things on cable that felt like dreams. Maybe we’d forget about them almost immediately, but they’d remain a part of our consciousness, influencing our taste and reappearing as flashes of something half-remembered. This is how I discovered the gritty miniseries that would become a lifelong obsession. While the Wicked musical was treading the boards on Broadway, another Wizard of Oz adaptation took television by storm when the three-episode Tin Man miniseries premiered on the Syfy Channel in December 2007. Watching it now feels like being transported back to a wilder, riskier era of TV, when shows could cast Richard Dreyfuss as a drug-addled magician living in a steampunk speakeasy and win Emmys for it.

This isn’t your grandparents’ Oz story. This version of the heroic Dorothy (nicknamed DG) rides a motorcycle to work, is good with tools, and is played by Zooey Deschanel, bangs and all. She lives in Kansas with her two loving parents, but a recurring dream about a mystical fantasyland makes her wonder if all is not as it seems. As it turns out, the world of DG’s visions is real, but it’s ruled over by an evil witch who plans to cast the entire realm into permanent, deadly darkness unless DG can figure out how to stop her.

Tin Man was conceived as a “reimagining” of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, updating it for a modern audience more used to laser guns and leather jackets than obscure metaphors about the gold standard. 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.

Tin Man is for the fans — assuming there are die-hard Wizard of Oz heads out there regularly tuning in to Syfy — and as such, its script is full of little references to Baum’s book and the 1939 movie, altered to suit the show’s grittier setting. The tornado that destroys DG’s family farm is a mode of inter-dimensional transportation used by the evil witch’s henchmen. The land of Oz is actually “the O.Z.,” an acronym for “Outer Zone.” Emerald City is “Central City.” The Cowardly Lion is a member of a half-human, half-animal race enslaved by Azkadellia for their powers of second sight.

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. (Honestly, if you’ve read the book on which the Wicked musical is based, you know things can get much, much bleaker.) Still, there’s a daringly mean streak running through this show that sets it apart from other reimaginings of its kind. Our heroes first find the eponymous Tin Man, for example, imprisoned in a metal sarcophagus, forced to watch video clips of his family being brutalized for decades. At least they didn’t show us Baum’s original backstory for the character, in which the Tin Woodman, once human, had to keep replacing his body parts with mechanical ones after being gradually dismembered by his own cursed axe.

Maybe it’s just the late-aughts nostalgia talking, but there’s a charming “throwing spaghetti at the wall” vibe to Tin Man that the current era of carefully managed and edited and aggregated entertainment just can’t replicate. Whether it’s “good” or “bad” is not a metric that applies here. Of the nine Primetime Emmy Awards it was nominated for, it won one, for Outstanding Makeup for a Mini-series or a Movie (Non-Prosthetic). (Rude to the lion-people.) 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.