Tarsem Singh to direct NBC’s Emerald City, because life is weird

By Sam Barsanti | July 14, 2015 | 9:00pm

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Director Tarsem Singh’s filmmaking career is scattered with surprising moves and seemingly nonsensical ideas. In 2000, he made the weirdo Jennifer Lopez thriller The Cell, which turned out to be a reasonably big hit. He followed that up six years later with The Fall, a divisive film that people either love because it looks gorgeous, or hate because their eyeglass prescription isn’t strong enough and they probably couldn’t see it properly. Then he made Immortals and Mirror Mirror, two films with predictably interesting visuals, but with storylines based on (or loosely based on) existing works—the myth of Theseus and the story of Snow White, respectively. After the inescapable uniqueness of his first two movies, Immortals and Mirror Mirror seemed more like Tarsem was trying to fit his style into studio-friendly projects that could be marketed more easily. Finally, just last week he released Self/Less, a movie that’s so average in every way that we’re pretty sure it was made by a different guy named Tarsem.

Now, Tarsem is taking his career to an even weirder place: NBC. As reported by Collider, he has signed on to direct all 10 episodes of Emerald City, the network’s ridiculous-sounding Wizard Of Oz show. (You know, it’s the one with “the Munja’kin.”) After dropping Emerald City last year, NBC picked it back up again in April and has apparently been moving forward with it since. With Tarsem on board, it should be a safe assumption that the show will at least look interesting, but that‘s less of a sure thing after Self/Less. Plus, NBC doesn’t seem to care about shows that look really interesting these days.