April 16th, 2015 Update: NBC has decided to try again and has revived Emerald City with another 10-episode order.
Just two months after FOX cancelled its event series Hieroglyph after filming the pilot episode, NBC last week announced it had dropped its own limited series Emerald City, a modern retelling of L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz books. It was picked up straight-to-series in January with a 10 episode order, to premiere during the 2014-2015 season alongside other event series like Heroes Reborn and Aquarius. Unlike Hieroglyph, it had yet to be cast and no episodes had been completed, only the pilot script and a few others.
According to Deadline Hollywood, creative differences between the network and executive producer Josh Friedman led NBC to drop the project but Universal Television plans on trying to find a new home for it somewhere else.
Here’s NBC’s official description of Emerald City:
Desperate for clues that will lead to the identity of her biological mother, a young woman breaks into a sinister underground facility somewhere in the Midwest. Unable to complete her mission and surrounded by security, our feisty heroine steals a K9 police dog and drives away into the night… and headlong into the path of a raging tornado. In the blink of an eye, she is transported to another world, one far removed from our own – a mystical land of competing kingdoms, lethal warriors, dark magic and a bloody battle for supremacy. This is the fabled Land of Oz in a way you’ve never seen before, where wicked witches don’t stay dead for long and 20-year-old Dorothy Gale becomes a headstrong warrior who holds the fate of kingdoms in her hands. You’re not in Kansas anymore, and this is not your Grandmother’s Oz.
This actually isn’t the first potential TV show based on Oz that NBC passed on in recent memory. Back in 2010, production company Dark Toy Entertainment had a comedy also called Emerald City in development for NBC, set in New York City. It went nowhere.
(Thanks to Bob for passing this along.)
In other words, “We just can’t afford to produce it”.