TV REVIEWS : A Mushy Story of the Wizard Behind ‘The Wizard of Oz’

We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz. Only NBC’s yellow brick road leads to the wizard of ooze.

Its story about the author of the children’s book that inspired that 1939 movie classic, “The Wizard of Oz,” is long on mush and short on magic. Airing at 9 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39, “The Dreamer of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story” finds John Ritter playing Baum as a one-dimensional bo-bo of such unfaltering goodness that he makes Mr. Rogers look like the Marquis de Sade.

Following one business failure after another, Baum ultimately converts his fanciful dreams and yarns into a best-selling children’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” Other successful books follow.

Written by Richard Matheson and directed by Jack Bender, “The Dreamer of Oz” is at once a 19th-Century maudlin love story (with Annette O’Toole as Baum’s loyal wife, Maud) and an unfulfilled kid’s story. With Ritter giving mostly a single-note performance, Baum comes alive only through his own imagination, as the stories he tells to enthralled children are translated on screen into charming fantasy. Here is where we meet Dorothy, the brainless scarecrow, the heartless tin man, the cowardly lion and other characters in his best-known book, including the Wiz himself, all of them inspired by people Baum knows.

Although these blazingly colorful sequences are mostly delightful fun and imaginatively mounted, they’re too infrequent to dent an otherwise stolid melodrama whose only spunky character is Baum’s critical mother-in-law (Rue McClanahan).

The message--that dreams are the best part of us--is very nice. Otherwise, this is woolly wizardry at best.