Like Mikey, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Baumite and a fan of just about everything Oz - from original series (plural) of books, which my dad read to me as a tyke, to the classic film, Fairuza Balk's awesomely wrong Return to Oz and both the book and the musical Wicked, which were themselves two very different takes on a similar story.

So I was psyched to see what SciFi would do to the old saw, which in all of its incarnations adds whimsy and fantasy to the story of a misunderstood and misguided or manipulated young woman. That thread was drawn even through the musical adaptation of Wicked, arguably the furthest removed from the source material.

The absence of that theme doesn't ruin Tin Man for me, but since it isn't really replaced with anything thematically solid, it does leave the narrative idling in neutral.

The story disappointed me, although I tried my best to like it. I love Zooey Deschanel and Alan Cumming, but they seem to be doing there best with crappy dialog and downright goofy plot points. It's almost as if the story were written as a challenge to be as generic sci-fi/fantasy as possible (witness Azkadelia, the evil sorceress who rules the land like a bad CW ice princess) while hitting as many condescending parallels with the original story as can be crammed into the television. Instead of the Scarecrow, we've got Cummings' "Glitch," a wacky drag queen with his brain removed. The Cowardly Lion is named "Raw," because he's an empath - get it? Even the titular Tin Man is just slang for "cop" in the Emerald City Central City, which lies down the Yellow Brick Road Old Road. And Auntie Em is a robot.

Not a robot in any significant way, mind you - just a robot. Sorta because she can be, I guess?

Kathleen Robertson, fabulous in Gregg Araki's Splendor, as well as in Psycho Beach Party - and much less less fabulous back in her 90210 days - is flat-out miscast as the ill-conceived Azkadelia. Replacing the beloved and manifold witches of Oz (remember the brilliant Jean Marsh as Mambi in Return to Oz?) with a generic "sexy" plug-n-play actress was a real tip-off to Tin Man's lack of creative integrity. A boring, safe choice among many.

With all the talent in the cast, and all the money SciFi must have thrown at Richard Dreyfuss to get him on board, I'm saddened but not surprised to see that the script is clearly where the budget got cut. Do the execs at SciFi think so poorly of their audience, to sell us this hokey porridge while billing it as "edgy" and "dark?"

Example: Oz is not Oz. Oz is the O.Z., or "Outer Zone." This is a concept that could be cool in the hands of dozens of talented writers. In Tin Man it comes off as a bad pun on The O.C.. So far I've found the series awkward, slow, and insultingly dumb.

The worst part, as a dedicated fan of the SciFi Channel and fantastic fiction in general, is that I'm left thinking: they canceled Farscape for this?