Land of Oz is reimagined in ‘Emerald City’

With sweeping European vistas, impressive special effects and dark and brooding characters, NBC’s “Emerald City” makes clear early on that this new fantasy/ drama series is not your father’s “The Wizard of Oz.” Nor are you in Kansas anymore.

Premiering Friday, the hourlong series, a reimagining of L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 novel, stars Adria Arjona (“True Detective,” “Narcos”) as Dorothy Gale, a young Kansas nurse who with K9 police dog Toto is swept by tornado into a fantastical land of competing realms, deadly warriors, dark magic and a bloody battle for supremacy.

It’s ruled over by the Wizard (a heavily bearded, nearly unrecognizable Vincent D’Onofrio, “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” “Jurassic World”), a guileful monarch who has outlawed magic, antagonized a growing cauldron of witches and is faced with disaster at the hands of a mythical force. He’s a fraud trying to maintain his tenuous hold on his kingdom.

And Dorothy’s dropping into this land seemingly from the sky certainly qualifies as magic in the eyes of its denizens, thus immediately making her an outlaw. As she fights to survive in this hostile realm, she discovers her own strength and empowerment, a plot point that the actress playing her, Arjona, found attractive.

“I felt responsible for certain aspects of the script,” Arjona explains, “that Dorothy’s a very insecure and settling character and just becomes this empowered woman toward the end. And I think that journey to me was a lot more important to showcase to little girls that you can embody yourself, you can be a strong woman.”

“I went on this journey with her,” she continues. “… (This role) was my first baby, it was my first lead in a TV show and obviously you start out a little bit scared, you start out a little bit nervous. You’re kind of unsure what is right and what is wrong and that’s the point where Dorothy kind of starts the show. And then toward the end, the crew becomes your family. The director becomes almost like your dad, your co-stars become your brothers and sisters, and you feel so much more comfortable and so much more empowered that it kind of feeds into the character itself. So at the end of the show, I felt a lot more secure of myself. I felt a little more like Dorothy, like the actual real Dorothy. I felt strong.”

Conversely, D’Onofrio – who was drawn to the project by the opportunity to work with director Tarsem Singh (“The Fall”) and a talented cast including Joely Richardson (“The Patriot”), Florence Kasumba (“Captain America: Civil War”), Oliver Jackson-Cohen (“The Raven”) and Ana Ularu (“Inferno”) — loved the idea of playing someone whose motives are not what they seem to be.

“I just took the whole idea of the original where he’s just a fake, the man behind a curtain,” he says, “and we just used that as a metaphor and we dove deep into the psychology of that and how, if we were going to examine that, how far would we go? Like, who is he to begin with? Who is he in the regular world and who does he pretend to be in Oz? … He almost becomes the king there in a way. And who does he have to be to get that far? And so we just developed him like that.”