The Medium is Not Enough

Thank You For Smoking, a pretty good film about PRs for evil people, is now lined up to become a single-camera comedy for NBC. The series, a continuation of the film, will see the Aaron Eckhart character represent a never-ending series of industries that have justifiably bad reputations. Not sure how this fits in which NBC’s plans to turn away from expensive, scripted comedy, but it could be good.

The Wizard of Oz is the latest classic piece of literature destined to be mangled by the SciFi Channel. Clearly not having learnt anything from the disaster that was Legend of Earthsea, an adaptation so bad the books’ author Ursula K Le Guin has written an article explaining why it’s so bad, they’re taking The Wizard of Oz to “the next level” where they hope to “make it relevant, modern and fresh to a new generation”.

The only thing that gives me a glimmer of hope is that Steven Long Mitchell and Craig Van Sickle will be writing it: they created the excellent NBC series The Pretender. But:

Using adjectives such as psychedelic, twisted and bizarre to describe “Tin Man,” Sci Fi said the mini turns Dorothy into a young woman named DG, who finds herself plunged into a netherworld called the Outer Zone. Other celebrated characters are reimagined in “Tin Man”: the cowardly lion as a wolverine-like creature without backbone, the wicked witch as a sorceress called Azkadellia and the wizard as a larger-than-life figure called the Mystic Man.

Doesn’t inspire much confidence, does it, book-lovers?