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Dark tower8/30/2023 Frank Baum's classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz through the eyes of a young African-American kindergarten teacher who's "never been below 125th Street." Leaving a large family dinner to chase her dog into a snowstorm, Dorothy (Diana Ross) is swept up by a cyclone and transplanted to the land of Oz - which looks suspiciously like a skewed version of the run-down Manhattan of the late '70s. It's the ka-tet that makes these books shine, not just Roland, and any version of season 1 that only focuses on Roland is one that would fail to establish the tone of the series, that would fail to give viewers a good idea of what they could expect going forward.Sidney Lumet's The Wiz is the film version of the popular Broadway musical that retells the events of L. At the very least the first season should make it to the end of "The Drawing of the Three" with Roland, Eddie and Susannah working together. Season 1 should end at book 3's halfway point, where the ka-tet of Roland, Eddie, Susannah, Jake and (of course) Oy has fully formed. Most importantly, any TV adaptation of "The Dark Tower" should establish the core ka-tet of the series by the end of the first season. ![]() Roland's backstory is something that would have to be told in Lost-style flashbacks throughout the series, or given maybe one or two full episodes of focus (three episodes max) before the series moved on. Dedicating a whole season to "Wizard and Glass," for instance, would be a death sentence for any show that cared even a little bit about keeping viewers tuned in. It's an odd assumption given how we've already seen with "Game of Thrones" and "The Expanse" that this isn't necessary. There's a strange misconception among a lot of "Dark Tower" fans when talking about an adaptation, however, where fans often seem to think that a TV series would have to dedicate one season to nearly every book. To pull this story off would require a lot of boldness on the part of the show's writers, and if the 2017 "Dark Tower" movie was any indication, boldness has been in short supply so far. This was already a deeply controversial plot point in the books, but how would this work for a TV show or a movie exactly? Instead of stumbling across "Salem's Lot" the novel, does Father Callahan discover a DVD of the upcoming "Salem's Lot" movie? Are they still reckoning with the idea that they might be book characters, or are they reckoning with the idea that they're unknowingly characters on a TV show? Or would it make more sense to throw in the additional layer of them realizing they're movie characters in an adaptation of a book? Admittedly this all sounds like it'd be very interesting to watch, but it sounds like a massive headache from a screenwriting perspective. Saving King's life is important to the characters because the car accident took place in 1999, and if King had died in the accident he wouldn't have been able to finish the final three books in the series, which were published in rapid succession in 2003, early 2004, and late 2004. The nostalgic feel of the flashback would also be lost.Ī big part of the seventh book, "The Dark Tower," centers around Roland and Jake's attempts to prevent Stephen King from dying in that real-life car accident that nearly killed him. ![]() The main arc taking place throughout the seven-book series is the ka-tet becoming closer and closer with each other, and by erasing the communal nature of "Wizard and Glass," they would've been severely undermining that arc. This is why the massive flashback in the books works well: it's not just that it fills us in on Roland's backstory, it's that it has the reader learn the backstory along with the other characters. ![]() Part of the fun of these books is watching Roland slowly open up despite the first book taking place almost entirely from his perspective, by the time we get to the beginning of "Wizard and Glass" the reader still knows about as much about the character as Eddie, Susannah, and Jake do. By the halfway point of book 3 ("The Waste Lands") Roland manages to redeem his earlier sin by saving Jake's life, and these characters end up forming a tight, inseparable bond. He ends up in a world-hopping mission where he meets and rescues Eddie, a troubled heroin addict, and Susannah, a woman who unknowingly suffers from dissociative identity disorder. The next book is when Roland's quest finds him forced to create a team, (a "ka-tet" as the books call it), which pulls him out of his shell.
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