Fairies and witches, angels and demons, wizards and monsters. A good fantasy story takes you to another world where magic is not always light and gentle.
Emerald City – Amazon
Once more a show based on a book, Emerald City is a retelling of the original story of the Wizard of Oz. While the famous film featuring Judy Garland won an Oscar in 1940 for best picture, it was a shortened adaptation of a series of books by L. Frank Baum, altered to conform to the conservative tastes of the time.
Emerald City is a grown-up version of the stories, were Dorothy Gale is a nurse from Kansas, transported to the Land of Oz in a car by a tornado, where she runs over the Wicked Witch of the East. Learning that she needs to find the Wizard in order to get back home she travels to the Emerald City.
On her way there, she meets and saves Lucas, a man who has been crucified but doesn’t remember why or even who he is. He decides to travel with her, his memories coming back bit by bit as they move along on their journey.
Other characters of the original books and the film appear also in the show, giving them a modern spin. Although beautifully made, the show fails to tell a coherent story, the different story lines never really melding together. Still it stays worth watching, if only for the way the characters from the movie, the scarecrow, the tin man and the cowardly lion, have been altered to fit into the universe of the show.
Emerald City is available on Amazon.
