LAST NIGHT WHEN WE WERE YOUNG
An Autopsy of NBC’s Emerald City
by Sarah Crotzer
Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 61, no. 1 (Spring 2017), pgs. 7–13
Citations
Chicago 17th ed.:
Crotzer, Sarah. “Last Night When We Were Young: An Autopsy of NBC’s Emerald City.” Baum Bugle 61, no. 1 (2017): 7–13.
MLA 9th ed.:
Crotzer, Sarah. “Last Night When We Were Young: An Autopsy of NBC’s Emerald City.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 61, no. 1, 2017, pp. 7–13.
(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with photographs that have not been reproduced here.)
I can’t tell you how much I loved Return to Oz growing up. It was my Oz movie. My granddad taped it for me off the Disney Channel on an extended-play VHS, and I practically memorized it. I loved it so much that I became very defensive of it, as well as blind to its flaws. I remember reading the review written by our then- (and, coincidentally, current) editor, John Fricke, for the Baum Bugle and just being appalled. How dare he not love it unconditionally?
Reading the review back as an adult, I see we actually admired many of the same things about the film. I think what really stuck in my craw was the title he chose, “The Joy That Got Away,” adapting it from the title of a famous Judy Garland song. [1] At the time, all I saw was the implication: that the film had no joy, no wonder, no magic of its own. As an adult, though, I see things differently. I still love Return to Oz, but there’s a lot about it that is deeply flawed, and I can’t blame others for their criticisms. The fact that it took me almost twenty years to even see the flaws says, I think, a little about me and a lot about our culture.
NBC’s recent ten-episode “event,” Emerald City, brought all of that to mind. I came in to Emerald City interested, eager, and ready for something new. I stayed there, too, through at least four episodes or so. It was only as we marched toward mid-season that I became aware that this was a series with no joy, no wonder, and no magic. This time, it didn’t take me twenty years to spot the problem – and the realization just made me feel so old.
With respect to Ms. Garland, I’ve borrowed another song title for my own review. ‘Cos there’s just no going back now, is there?
It’s not like this is an unexpected development. If Return to Oz initiated a trend toward “dark Oz,” it’s been codified in the last three decades in works as diverse as Gregory Maguire’s Wicked novels, the Caliber Press Oz comics, and the Oz: Broken Kingdom game I play regularly on my smartphone. The recent success of Dorothy Must Die is the latest demonstration of a now-familiar template: take Baum’s Oz (or something close to it), throw in a little of the best-remembered MGM iconography, and upend it into total chaos. Sometimes the darkness comes from an “untold story”; sometimes it’s a Nome invasion. More often than not, it’s simply “dark magic.” Whatever the reason, we’re told, Oz is lost, and what we’re left with is brutal and broken.
Usually, I can look beyond all that and take an intellectual stance, asserting that every interpretation has something to offer. Often, I try to engage with these projects simply to see a new take on an old friend: What will their Tik-Tok be like? I wonder. What about their Scraps, or their Polychrome, or their Jack Pumpkinhead? I stab away at my smartphone, ignoring the terrible dialogue and repetitive action; I turn the page and try to look beyond the latest grisly confrontation. At a basic level, this is junk, not art; its purpose is commercial, and it trades on a beloved property without contributing anything new or meaningful. I admit that I have, at times, put myself through a lot of junk and tried to pretend that I’m not a junkie.
Emerald City forces me to face my pretense. Somewhere around episode five or six I realized that I was making excuses for a series that has only the vaguest relationship to the Oz I know and love. Actually, I take that back: it barely resembles an Oz anybody knows and loves, whether that’s Baum, MGM, Wicked, or any other. To justify using a few familiar concepts and character names, NBC has produced a series that not only lacks joy and wonder but revels in problematic sexual politics and unnecessary violence. Worse, the series’ creators have the gall to suggest that to create their grim, grey Oz, they went right back to the source.
In an Entertainment Weekly blog before the premiere, executive producers David Schulner and Shaun Cassidy talked about the “timelessness” of the Oz books: “One hundred years after these stories were written,” they said, “women are still fighting for empowerment, science and religion/magic are often at war, and the pursuit of identity—racial, gender, and otherwise—remains at the forefront of our political and cultural conversation.”[2] As a generalization about cultural politics in the United States of 2017, I agree with their statement. However, there’s an elephant in the room that they barely address: what, if anything, does that have to do with L. Frank Baum’s Oz?
A later blog from Shaun Cassidy provides a clue. Following the series finale, he rephrased and repeated the earlier claim, adding that “because the books were not originally written as children’s tales but as political allegory, their core themes still resonated for us.”[3] Say what? Is that Henry M. Littlefield and his self-avowed tongue-in-cheek essay of 1964, “A Parable on Populism,” casting its long shadow all the way into 2017? Whatever the impetus, it’s easy to get caught up in outrage or ridicule and ignore the statement’s true meaning: the producers gave themselves license to do whatever they wanted, and Oz’s “timeless story” and “iconic characters” became the excuse to get us to sit through it all.
It took me half of the series to realize I was playing the junkie again, following the carrot and willfully ignoring the stick. To a large degree, that’s because I wanted the show to work. After the colorful and blustery Oz the Great and Powerful, I saw a lot of potential in a more serious-minded treatment of that same tale, one that eschewed special effects and focused on the politics between four frighteningly powerful women and the huckster who comes out of nowhere and seizes power. For a while, I really thought that’s what I was going to get. Eventually, I realized that not only wasn’t I getting what I expected, I wasn’t getting much of a take on The Wizard of Oz, either. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, indeed.
As it turns out, the casual viewer either rapidly abandoned Emerald City or never came on board in the first place. Elsewhere in this issue, Jared Davis discusses the series’ progressively declining and overall disastrous ratings, as well as its unlikely chance at renewal for a second season. In part, this must come down to simple scheduling. Friday is a notoriously bad night for series television, with minimal chance that an ad would entice a young adult audience into Emerald City as a Game of Thrones lookalike—if, indeed, they even bother to watch network TV at all these days.[4] What, then, is there to pull in middle-aged, senior, or child viewers? There is nothing about Emerald City to appeal to those who grew up watching the MGM movie on television or video. Even the cinematography of the series is dark and unappealing; ironically, Emerald City itself is depressing and grey. The only thing that glitters emerald green is the series logo.
Many critics agreed. USA Today said that Emerald City’s premiere episodes “took the original story and made it darker, drearier, and more violent”; AV Club said that it was so “paint-by-numbers grim-and-gritty . . . it borders on self-parody.”[5] In a wonderful burst of blogger rage, the Observer probably had the most memorable line, calling it “the direct result of some evil thing hooking the cheerful, technicolor classic . . . up to the death machine from The Princess Bride and sucking every ounce of life out of it.”[6] The Rotten Tomatoes website records 38% positive reviews of the premiere, but the praise of several, including the Atlantic (“not always . . . totally absorbing”) and the Detroit News (“derivative”), was distinctly muted.[7]
It’s one thing to say the series fails based on mainstream audience expectations. What is far more damning is how Emerald City fails to live up to its own platform. Schulner and Cassidy’s glib invocation of real-world politics invites a certain comparison, and none of the issues they raise is addressed by Emerald City in a way that is less than problematic.
Racial identity is not a part of Emerald City, so why the producers chose to bring it up (except as a cultural buzzword) I’m not sure. On the positive side, it must be said that Emerald City boasts a refreshingly diverse cast. There are actors involved from all over the world, and while that occasionally leads to a little dissonance for the audience (why do some of the Wizard’s guards suddenly have thick British accents?), it’s pleasant to see these characters—who could be played by anyone—portrayed by a vibrant cross-section of humanity. In particular, series star Adria Arjona has spoken of her pride in leading the series as a Hispanic actor.[8] Less progressively, though, a firm majority of the regular cast is white, including the two characters established at the outset to have the most power—the Wizard and Glinda—while the characters with the darkest skin are dispatched the quickest. Florence Kasumba’s Eastern witch, whose image oozed power in the series trailers, takes a gunshot to the head in the second episode. In the next installment, East’s slave Sullivan is presumably killed in the destruction of her castle, and we are never told the fate of Glinda’s acolyte who is punished for her pregnancy. If this is representation, it comes at a heavy price.
Representation of gender and sexual identity, while less overtly negative, is perhaps even more problematic. There are no characters who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual anywhere in this version of Oz—and that wouldn’t be an issue at all, if it weren’t for the staggering number of heterosexual liaisons to which we are witness. The only character who falls anywhere under the umbrella of queer is Tip, who references the modern conception of Tip/Ozma as transgender. (This is post-modern revisionism, far removed from authorial intent, but it’s a legitimate interpretation for many fans and one I personally find intriguing.) Although Tip is portrayed by an actress and spends most of the series in disenchanted female form, he is firm in his resolution that his true self is male. In the ninth episode, he gains the ability to become a boy again. He tells West: “Do you have any idea what it was like for me to look in the mirror and see a stranger staring back? To have someone else all over me, infecting me? This skin . . . it’s the only thing that was ever mine.”[9] Yet what feels like positive and progressive character development is undermined by the very next episode, where we learn that he must take on the physical identity of Ozma both to wield magical power, which is explicitly aligned with the feminine in Emerald City, and to inspire the allegiance of the witches of Oz. We never see Tip’s male body again, and his internal conflict is left unresolved. Is the message, then, that we must subvert our true identities to get ahead in life? I hope that if Emerald City continues, this conflict will be addressed. Right now, the women of Oz are being led by someone who’s just as much a pretender (albeit under duress) as the Wizard of Oz.
Women fighting for empowerment is a particularly thorny issue in Emerald City, one that was addressed at slightly more length by the producers. At an NBC press event in December, they were quick to dissuade comparisons to HBO’s Game of Thrones and the ongoing controversy surrounding its depiction of sexual violence against women. Schulner assured readers that his series was “100 percent less rape-y”—a distressingly glib turn of phrase—and Cassidy insisted that “every female character . . . has an incredibly strong arc.” Schulner said that Baum’s books were “infused with feminism” and specifically cited Jinjur’s Army of Revolt in Baum’s The Marvelous Land of Oz. (He also called “Baum’s mom . . . one of the very first suffragettes,” surely a mangled reference to Matilda Joslyn Gage, Baum’s mother-in-law.) [10] Frankly, it’s a little disappointing that he seems to have entirely missed the satire underpinning the Army of Revolt, and worse, that it’s his only example of the books’ feminism. In the Oz books, Baum espouses several beliefs that clearly mark him as supportive of the women’s movement. Chief among these is his repeated assertion that women are better administrators of power than men, as is most notably manifest in Glinda, the Gaia-like mother figure who represents all-encompassing wisdom and justice in Baum’s Oz. She sits in counterpoint to male characters like the Wizard, whose power is fraudulent, and the Nome King, who uses power like a spoiled brat. That same dynamic appears to exist at the outset of Emerald City, but it is crucially compromised.
Glinda—as well as her sisters West and East (why does she have a name and not them?)—clearly possesses real power; by killing East and taking her gauntlets, Dorothy can tap into the power of the cardinal witches, too. The oppression of the witches of Oz forms the backbone of Emerald City, such as it is, and that makes a certain skewed sense. Obviously, in any iteration of the Oz story, the Wizard waltzes in from the Great Outside World and seizes control; that has to have ramifications, and it seems like a natural step to go from Wicked’s cloaked racial message to one about the patriarchy. In an interview, Adria Arjona described how excited she was to play “a really strong, feminist, empowering role” like Dorothy, so it’s not a leap to assume the audience is intended to read Emerald City as an empowering show.[11]
Ultimately, Emerald City appears to be female-driven rather than feminist, which is a crucial difference (and easy to gloss over in publicity). There are more female than male characters in the regular cast—Dorothy, West, Glinda, Langwidere, and Jane, opposite the Wizard, Lucas, Jack, Tip and Eammon – and a six-to-four majority of female actors. That means that we spend an unusual amount of time with female characters, true. All of the female characters named above, however, are defined largely by the power dynamics they share with at least two men. I learned nothing about Langwidere, for instance—well, aside from the fact the producers missed one of Baum’s more oblique say-it-aloud puns—beyond her fealty to her father, the political power the Wizard wields over her, and the sexual power she wields over Jack. Dorothy suffers a similar lack of development, and when even Glinda is stuck between political and sexual power struggles, you know something must be wrong. Whole episodes stop dead for long, breathy sex scenes that add almost nothing to the plot, presumably because the producers think that’s what we want to see, and we are treated to some truly awful dialogue along the way. “I see that your roses have not yet withered,” Lucas growls at Glinda in the eighth episode. “Is that a metaphor?” she responds.[12] An astonishingly vapid one, yes—and proof positive, if any was needed by this point, that such a heavily female cast is mostly just an excuse for bad soap opera.
By reducing the conflict of the series to base essentialism—women vs. men, religion vs. science—Emerald City does its audience a huge disservice. The final few episodes boil down to a fight between feminized mysticism and masculinized violence, which is both trite and nonsensical. Worse, just as a viewer, I don’t even understand the foundation of the fight. One scene leads us to believe that Frank Morgan became the Wizard, at least in part, because he leveraged himself (rather laughably) as “a scientist.”[13] Other dialogue implies that he forced or manipulated the Munja’kin Nahara to bring stone giants to life, forming a wall that surrounded Emerald City and blocked out the last iteration of the legendary “Beast Forever”—in this case, a giant flood.[14] We are never shown these events, and I still don’t have a clue how Vincent D’Onofrio – whose performance often feels like it comes from an entirely different series – convinced the people of Oz of anything, especially with the cardinal witches around. Instead of helping me to understand the character, his motivation, or his history as the Wizard, the series is content to show me a couple of awkward flashbacks of Vincent D’Onofrio in an even worse wig than usual. There is no real, legitimate discussion of the conflict between religion and science, or anything like it. Mostly, it just comes down to guns.
I think I finally lost my calm when the guns came out. They’re such a cheap stunt: in part, because they are such an unsubtle representation of male power, and in part, because they automatically dispel any compassion I might have had for the Wizard’s point of view. Worse, though, is that instead of fully casting judgment on the Wizard and his schemes at that point—the only reasonable thing to do—the series decides to maintain an omniscient viewpoint, which drags us further into soap opera territory. Emerald City doesn’t glorify violence, but it certainly enjoys showing violence whenever it can. By the end of the series, there are self-immolations, suicides by hanging, burned corpses, assassinations, executions, throats cut, and at least two occasions where someone is hacked into pieces. As fans of The Wizard of Oz, we’re all familiar with the Tin Woodman’s axe, and the story of how he came to be; this is the first version I can think of that actually shows us what his axe can do to a human body. The series chooses to view violence as a threat and potential obstacle without casting any real judgment. In the finale, then, we are left to view images of violence—the witches and the Wizard’s guards fighting, Jack’s body in pieces on the ground—alongside some of the rare images of magic the series has to offer: the stone giant walking, the winged monkey drones taking flight. They aren’t separated or delineated at all; instead, they’re all part of a dreadful, relentless drumming toward war: war because it’s the only way to solve these conflicts, war because it’s what happens in a season finale. War, it seems, because no one can think of anything more interesting. This, then, is an Oz not about female empowerment, racial diversity, or magic. This is an Oz about taking sides.
I can’t think of anything that has less to do with the Oz I know and love.
As of this writing, Emerald City is probably finished. It’s unlikely to see a second season. If it does, though, I hope fervently it gets new showrunners. There’s a lot of potential here, and if someone acts fast, it could turn around into something much more interesting. Will that happen? I doubt it. More likely, it will simply fade away, another in a long line of failures at NBC. (If I really wanted to be cynical, I might even suggest it was scheduled on Fridays because NBC knew they had a lemon.) Probably—fortunately—Emerald City will never engender the lasting negativity in the mainstream that Return to Oz did in 1985. It is so harsh, so grey, so unfriendly, so lacking in sustained creativity, I see very little chance of it developing into a cult favorite, either. I don’t think anyone will look back fondly on it as a beloved childhood memory in 2049. Soon, the series will become just another footnote in Oz history, and yet—I feel as if the landscape has irrevocably changed.
This is what all the Wickeds and Dorothy Must Dies are telling us: the Oz stories are old now. The time in which they fulfilled their original function as simple children’s stories may soon pass, or indeed, may have passed already. For any living thing to persist, it must adapt, and stories are alive, too; they shift and change as they move from one teller to another. Right now, we are witnessing L. Frank Baum’s story changing in our culture. Do I want to see it continue its metamorphosis down this particular path? No, I really, really don’t. My hope is that this is an evolutionary dead-end and that soon, we’ll step back a few paces and try again. In the meantime, Emerald City is symptomatic of a trend that has gone on too long to be a trend, a rebellion that is no longer rebellious. It’s just cheap, and commercial, and deeply, deeply cynical.
Last night, the song says, when we were young . . . life was so new, so real, so right, ages ago, last night. Today, the world is old.[15]
Sing it, Judy. I know just how you feel.
[1] John Fricke, “The Joy That Got Away,” Baum Bugle 29, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 11.
[2] David Schulner and Shaun Cassidy, “Emerald City EPs Discuss the Series Debut and Those Gorgeous Locations,” Entertainment Weekly, January 7, 2017, http://ew.com/tv/2017/01/07/emerald-city-eps-on-series-debut/. Aside from this example, Schulner and Cassidy alternated authorship of an additional eight blogs for the EW site.
[3] Shaun Cassidy, “Emerald City EP Shaun Cassidy Thanks Fans After Finale,” Entertainment Weekly, March 3, 2017, http://ew.com/tv/2017/03/03/emerald-city-ep-shaun-cassidy-finale/.
[4] Matt Rosoff, “Teens and Millennials Are Abandoning Network TV,” Business Insider, October 8, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/teens-and-millennials-are-abandoning-network-tv-2015-10.
[5] Robert Bianco, “Review: ‘Emerald City,’ With Grown-Up Dorothy, is Deeply Flawed,” USA Today, January 5, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2017/01/05/review-emerald-city-nbc-wizard-oz-robert-bianco/96159216/; Erik Adams, “NBC’s Gorgeous ‘Emerald City’ is a ‘Wizard of Oz’ That’s Neither Great Nor Powerful,” A.V. Club, January 6, 2017, http://www.avclub.com/review/nbcs-gorgeous-emerald-city-wizard-oz-s-neither-gre-248036.
[6] Vinnie Mancuso, “‘Emerald City’ Review: The Gritty Reboot to End All Gritty Reboots,” Observer, January 11, 2017, http://observer.com/2017/01/emerald-city-nbc-review-vincent-donofrio-wizard/.
[7] “Emerald City: Season 1 – TV Reviews – Rotten Tomatoes,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed March 31, 2017, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/emerald_city/s01/reviews/; Sophie Gilbert, “NBC’s ‘Emerald City’ Takes Dorothy to a Darker Oz,” Atlantic, January 5, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/nbc-emerald-city-review/512249/; Tom Long, “TV Review: ‘Emerald City’ Details a Very Different Oz,” Detroit News, January 5, 2017, http://www.detroitnews.com/story/entertainment/television/2017/01/05/tv-review-emerald-city-details-different-oz/96226938/.
[8] Adria Arjona, interview by Jesus Trivino. “Exclusive: Adria Arjona Revolutionizes TV With Her Role as ‘Emerald City’s‘ Dorothy,” Latina, February 2, 2017, http://www.latina.com/entertainment/tv/adria-arjona-emerald-city-exclusive-interview. Arjona gave several interviews with similar content.
[9] Jordan Loughran, “The Villain That’s Become,” Emerald City, directed by Tarsem Singh, written by Tracy Bellomo, NBC, February 24, 2017.
[10] David Schulner, and Shaun Cassidy, interview by Emily Bicks, “‘Emerald City’: ‘Game of Thrones’ Meets Oz with One Incredibly Awesome, Notable Difference,” Screener, December 27, 2016, http://screenertv.com/television/emerald-city-game-of-thrones-meets-oz-with-one-incredibly-awesome-notable-major-difference/. Many other outlets reported the same quotes from the event with Schulner and Cassidy.
[11] Adria Arjona, interview by Kristen Tauer, “Adria Arjona Brings a New Dorothy Gale to Oz in ‘Emerald City’,” WWD, January 6, 2017, http://wwd.com/eye/people/adria-arjona-emerald-city-nbc-wizard-of-oz-10737400/.
[12] Oliver Jackson-Cohen, and Joely Richardson, “Lions in Winter,” Emerald City, directed by Tarsem Singh, written by Shaun Cassidy, NBC, February 17, 2017.
[13] Vincent D’Onofrio, “Beautiful Wickedness,” Emerald City, directed by Tarsem Singh, teleplay by Kelly Sue DeConnick, story by Leah Fong, NBC, February 3, 2017.
[14] Adria Arjona, and Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, “The Villain That’s Become,” Emerald City, directed by Tarsem Singh, written by Tracy Bellomo, NBC, February 24, 2017.
[15] Judy Garland, “Last Night When We Were Young,” by Harold Arlen, and Yip Harburg, in Judy, 1956, rerelease 1989. I consulted Capitol’s original CD issue of this musical album.
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