Tonight's episode is the fourth and last of the six that were produced that ABC intends to run. (All six will be seen in Canada, at least, on the cable channel Space, starting in November). And it was the episode a number of viewers were most eager to see, I suspect, since it was based on a short story by Harlan Ellison, who has established himself as a major figure in both fantastic fiction (among other sorts of prose) and in screenwriting, as well as being responsible for some notable comics scripting and work in other media. Apparently Ellison gave executive producer Keith Addis strong support when they resisted the attempts by ABC to call the series "Masters of Sci-Fi," which would be comparable to calling its Showtime sibling series Masters of Horror something like "Masters of Spookiness" (ABC chose to slip "scifi" into the URL for the series' pages on abc.go.com, anyway... perhaps the smallest of many hostilities the network has shown toward this project). And the story was ad...
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Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow Pictures are teaming on Oz, Spawn creator Todd McFarlane's revisionist take on the L. Frank Baum books that begat the Wizard of Oz chestnut. Though McFarlane's vision is described as "dark, edgy and a muscular PG-13," and an Oz toy line he launched years ago reimagined a rather buxom Ms. Gale, screenwriter Josh Olson (A History of Violence) tells Variety, "Dorothy as some bondage queen isn't something I want to do. I want this to be Harry Potter-dark, not Seven-dark."
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