Alice in Syfy Land

By Lisa Fary

I’m still on the fence about Alice. Not feeling excited, but am mildly interested even though the miniseries is from the same guy who did Tin Man and Hallmark Entertainment’s disastrous Jason and the Argonauts miniseries.

Pink Raygun was invited to participate in a conference call promoting the Syfy miniseries with writer/ director Nick Willing and Caterina Scorsone, the actress portraying Alice.  In addition to getting some questions answered, I was also hoping that the call would generate some excitement within my cold, dead heart for the miniseries.

What I was really interested in was why redo Alice in Wonderland. This isn’t the first time writer/ director Nick Willing has done the story; ten years ago he directed an adaptation with Martin Short, Whoopi Goldberg, and Christopher Lloyd. So why do Alice again? There are a lot of classic fantasy stories and fairy tales that are in the public domain, any of which would make an interesting revision. Why not Hansel and Gretel? Or even Peter Pan?

There seems to be a zeitgeist surrounding Alice in Wonderland in the past few years. There is this Syfy miniseries, the Burton movie coming up in 2010, as well as Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars series.

I didn’t get to ask directly, but Willing and Scorsone touched upon it in response to another questions. Willing and Scorsone think it’s related to the uncertainty of our own world, particularly after 9/11. They said nothing is the way it was, everything was topsy turvy, and for a long time it was a struggle to make sense of it all. Effectively, in a way, we’re all Alice.

I get that.

What I didn’t get to ask was my question about the character of Alice. In what I’ve read, Alice’s father left when she was ten years old, leaving her with daddy issues and an inability to commit to a relationship with a man. I wanted to know why it was important to include those things in her character and why it was important to the story. We see those characteristics in television women fairly often, and nearly just as often, it’s a shortcut used in place of writing a truly dynamic, complex character.

I don’t know if that’s the case with Alice, since I didn’t get to ask a question. If it is, I doubt anyone would own up to it, anyway.

Alice premieres on Syfy on December 6th.

Lisa Fary is a graduate of the creative writing program at Florida State University and holds an advanced degree in Special Education. Her earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She’s angry that it’s almost 2010 and she still doesn’t have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram.

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