More than 80 years after its release, the musical “The Wizard of Oz” is a well-worn source of metaphors for just about everything. That impulse works overtime in a biography of the author of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” L. Frank Baum. The two hour film “American Oz” on “American Experience” (PBS, 9 p.m., check local listings) combs through the author’s past before he writes the 1900 classic children’s book about half way in. Time spent in the Dakotas and Kansas led to his bleak outlook of the midwest; a desire to get home from his traveling salesman job is supposedly behind the “no place is home” mantra (that was in the movie; “Take me home to Aunt Em!” was as close as Baum got in the book).
Anyway, once Oz popularity fires up, there are a lot of interesting tidbits about the stage version that really made him rich, early silent movies that didn’t do as well, and the sequels he just kept writing. There are an awful lot of historians and talking heads in the documentary, each probably inspired by that popular movie, and a lot of modern talk about his empowered Dorothy and some of his more racist writings.
The new six-part Australian miniseries “The Secrets She Keeps” (AMC, 10 p.m.) stars Laura Carmichael as a pregnant supermarket stocker in the Sydney suburbs who envies a customer (Jessica De Gouw). Adapted from the thriller by Michael Robotham,it also stars Michael Sheasby, Jenni Baird and Ryan Corr.
Couples from the various “Love & Hip Hop” shows work on their relationships on “VH1 Couples Retreat” (VH1, 9 p.m.).