Revisiting Oz with 'Tin Man'

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — "Tin Man" is "The Wizard of Oz" re-imagined. Sort of. Although it has almost nothing in common with the '39 film.

Executive producer/writer Craig Van Sickle said the miniseries is a "labor of love" for him and his partner, executive/producer writer Steven Long Mitchell.

"When Sci Fi said, 'Go, give it a shot, and let your imaginations run wild,' we did," Van Sickle said.

"Tin Man," which airs in three parts (Sunday, Monday and Tuesday at 7, 9 and 11 p.m. on Sci Fi), is not a musical and it's not a children's story. It's a sci-fi/fantasy adventure about a quest.

"This story is like a classic story of people who go on a quest," said Alan Cumming, who stars as the Scarecrow-ish Glitch. "They all come together. They're all looking for something. And they all believe that when they get to this special place, they will find the answers.

"What makes it such a beautiful story is that on the way, they realize that it's not about the getting there; it's about the going that is what's going to give them the answers, and they actually have all the answers within them. So it's really lovely to do a story that's reiterating that message."

The three-part miniseries has more in common with quest-like miniseries we've seen on Sci Fi before than it does with the "Wizard of Oz." "When we pitched it to Sci Fi ... we all agreed that we really wanted to just cut loose and reinvent a world that we'd never seen before right down to it's not Oz, it's the O.Z. It's a total re-invention," Van Sickle said. "And these guys gave us the freedom to just go wild with it, and we did."

There are permutations on all the familiar characters, but they're hugely different from what we've seen before.

DG (Zoey Deschanel) is a waitress who's unhappy with her life in Kansas. When a tornado comes to town — complete with storm troopers dispatched by evil sorceress Azkadellia (Kathleen Robertson) — DG is transported to the O.Z. (the Outer Zone).

Azkadellia rules the O.Z. with an iron fist, although there are resistance fighters. And, without giving too much away, there's a tie between DG and Azkadellia that Dorothy Gale and the Wicked Witch of the West would never have imagined.

Both DG and Azkadellia are searching for a mystical emerald on which the fate of the O.Z. depends.