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domino harvey wrote:Believe the hype. I just spent the last couple days marathoning all three seasons of Game of Thrones and I don't think I've ever watched any TV series quite as addictive as this one-- Oz and the Wire come close, and all three shows share tendencies: great actors, juicy scripts, and an unsureness of the immediate future.

I'm really happy that you mention OZ in the same breath with those other two shows. In my experience, it's reputation among critics is decidedly mixed. That doesn't really bother me, as such, but it's still nice to see it garner some recognition here.

I think it gets overlooked because it is (especially compared to the other two shows I mentioned) trashy fun rather than the high art of later post-Sopranos HBO shows. I wouldn't put it up there in terms of overall value, but the show consistently delivered some of the best acting on TV, and it's no surprise so many principals went on to other things. Watching the Wire or Law and Order was always a scavenger hunt of waiting for actors I know from Oz to show up. Like Game of Thrones or the Wire after it, Oz was one of the first TV shows that prided itself on unease and upending the safety of traditional protagonists in longform narrative fiction, as you could never be quite sure who'd make it to the next episode-- you'd have your little mental list of three or four characters you know can't die and then, BAM, you have to redraft your list!

Count me in as a big Oz fan as well - a great cast full of regularly overshadowed and often underutilised character actors all got their chances to shine there (perhaps this is an even better example of that process than even The Sopranos, and a pre-Carmela Soprano Edie Falco even turns up here as a warder dealing with both sides) - J.K. Simmons, Lee Tergesen, Ernie Hudson, Zeljko Ivanek, Rita Moreno, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kirk Acevedo and so on.

I also think that the later Six Feet Under stole a trick from Oz for its opening death sequences, given that Oz always used to have those (sometimes sad, sometimes ironic, often blackly comic, occasionally horrific) black and white flashback sequences detailing how each character came to end up in jail!

It was particularly great to see Harold Perrineau get the ongoing role of the Shakespearian 'chorus' introducing the themes and often guest characters of each episode, considering that around the same time he was consistently being let down in feature films - the expendable black pilot who crashes Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins in the wilderness and then gets eaten by the big bear soon-to-be-nemesis in The Edge was particularly annoying.

Of course later Perrineau portrayed an incredibly annoying single-minded character in Lost, but that shouldn't be held against his Oz performance!

And Oz went places in terms of content that in many ways remains unmatched to this day-- name me any other show that would feature a central character both peeing on camera and spreading his buttocks to expose his rectum. Not that that specific example is a selling point, but it is indicative of how all bets were truly off as to how far anything could go.

I think one of the reasons it only had a fringe viewing audience then and now is thanks to how inescapably bleak and cynical it is-- there is almost never any hope, little chance of conventional redemption (Alvarez's fifth season storyline is among the cruelest in this regard), and such an impenetrable hardness in its worldview. That it's all that and not depressing is one of its many virtues, and the small successes and advancements are what one comes to accept and thrive on-- Take one of the most powerful moments in the entire series (mild spoiler for I think season two)

Spoiler

Was when Adebisi stopped Kenny Wangler from stealing the Disneyland fund with the admonition that they didn't always have to be bad

The show wasn't afraid to reveal the humanity of the inhumane and revel in its assorted machinations.

Absolutely, it was incredibly dark, explicit and quite brutal in its treatment of the characters (casual male rape, swastika branding, suicide, murder, assaults, people being driven past the point of total insanity and so on) whether prisoners, guards or the rest of the staff! One of the bleaker aspects was the way that feelings or falling in love was usually the first sign of a chink of humanity in a character's armour that often got horrifically abused or ended up twisting itself into psychotic violence.

Every time things begin to go well for a character I found myself unconsciously taking up a brace position for the inevitable horrible ripping away of any small comfort!

I was really disappointed with how Lost used Perrineau as well. Augustus was a great character, and the introductions of each of the inmates remain one of my favorite features of any TV show, along with the fantastic opening credit sequence.

It's been some time since I've last watched the show, but I remember my fondness for it becoming quite diminished when

Spoiler

Adebisi dies, since Akinnuoye-Agbaje is such a powerhouse of an actor that his presence was sorely missed.

Still, the show was my introduction to the kind of gritty drama that has become rather common today. But what separates Oz from just about every other drama I've seen is the acting, as others have mentioned - just a fantastic ensemble all around. The series also has this undefinable quality about it, perhaps someone else can better describe it but the characters are in this purgatory and it's just a forgone conclusion that there is no hope of escape. It really captured the feeling of prison as this almost alien world, with the outside world becoming more and more distant the longer you're in Oz. One of my favorite scenes is also the first scene I saw of Oz - on a horribly static channel that had by chance picked up HBO's broadcast signal: One of the inmates is lamenting never being able to touch a woman's body again, comparing this inability to its own kind of death, and as he speaks a naked woman seductively moves about on screen.

Whatever faults it may have had, this show has been the benchmark against which I measure all other TV dramas.

With all the talk in the last week for obvious reasons about The Sopranos, people forget that it was Oz, not The Sopranos, that paved the way for this era of intense, at times brutal, one hour television. Along with Dream On, I consider it to be the most underrated tv show of my lifetime.

colinr0380 wrote:Every time things begin to go well for a character I found myself unconsciously taking up a brace position for the inevitable horrible ripping away of any small comfort!

What's worse, when things did go well for a character, it would invariably be one who didn't deserve it-- I'm thinking of (Spoiler about the fate of a third-string character from season four I think)

Spoiler

Said getting Jason Cramer off on a technicality and he just coasts right out of the jail even though he is freely admits his guilt. And all this serves to do is further the divide between the then-exiled Said and his people due to Cramer being gay

But man, building up all those resentments and power plays built up to some great releases-- I don't think anything in the series could match the power of the finish to the whole "Querns runs Em City" plot in Season Four. Really one of the great payoffs in TV history in my book

I watched quite a bit of it during it's original run. No real desire to revisit it, just too bleak for me to do so. Didn't help that for much of it my dad was actually in jail. He rented the first season later on and said that compared to his experience it was a bit over the top for him. I read on IMDB that Michael Mann and Eddie Bunker were going to develop a series based on Eddie's time in prison and Michael's research into places like Folsom and Chino. I'm guessing Oz put the brakes on that much like Traffic did to the project Mann was going to do for Fox about the California drug trade.

domino harvey wrote: Watching the Wire or Law and Order was always a scavenger hunt of waiting for actors I know from Oz to show up.

You can do that with Homicide, as well.

The Prison Riot episode of that show, featuring a typically powerhouse performance from Charles S. Dutton, is considered something of a dress rehearsal for OZ.

Black Hat wrote:With all the talk in the last week for obvious reasons about The Sopranos, people forget that it was Oz, not The Sopranos, that paved the way for this era of intense, at times brutal, one hour television. Along with Dream On, I consider it to be the most underrated tv show of my lifetime.

I do think it is interesting that in the UK Channel 4 tucked all six seasons of Oz away during their (excellent) 4Later strand - and this was really was 'later', as in 1 or 2 a.m. on a Thursday evening/Friday morning. Perhaps that was appropriate for the tough subject matter, but that I am sure also played its part in limiting the audience. This was from 1998, so pretty soon after it aired in the US but the timeslot probably led to it being missed by many viewers. By way of contrast Channel 4 first showed The Sopranos from 1999 in a Wednesday 10 p.m. slot with all the attendant hype and promos (though then Channel 4 cruelly betrayed The Sopranos by sticking the final two seasons as an exclusive on one of their digital channels, I think E4, long before digital switchover occurred). Six Feet Under was treated the same way too.

Interestingly now that Sky has signed a rather restrictive deal with HBO (creating their "Sky Atlantic" channel to screen all the shows on) that has led to almost all HBO shows, apart from The Ricky Gervais Show, disappearing from non-subscription UK television (for example while I was never the biggest fan of Nurse Jackie, the BBC lost the rights to that after series 2, overshadowed a little by the fuss over their loss of Mad Men to Sky at the same time). The Wire did turn up on the BBC, but that was notoriously picked up five or so years after the first series was aired in the US with it appearing that no British television channels wanted to pick it up at first. The BBC then blew through all the seasons in weeknight post 11 p.m. double bills, as if embarrassedly wanting to blow through it as quickly as possible.

So unfortunately people like myself who do not subscribe to Sky have to wait for the boxsets. Whereas in the past Oz was available to the entire country, albeit tucked away late at night, to watch or miss, now something like Game Of Thrones doesn't get a non-subscription channel screening at all.

domino harvey wrote:And Oz went places in terms of content that in many ways remains unmatched to this day-- name me any other show that would feature a central character both peeing on camera and spreading his buttocks to expose his rectum. Not that that specific example is a selling point, but it is indicative of how all bets were truly off as to how far anything could go.

Those kinds of scenes during the series reminded me a little of the Nick Broomfield/Joan Churchill documentary Tattooed Tears, which put fly-on-the-wall cameras on both staff and prisoners of a high security youth offender correctional institution in California and included a (rather intrusive) scene where the cameras are allowed to follow the process of cell inspection, strip searching and getting the prisoner to show the soles of their feet and do a 'cheek spread' to show that they were not concealing anything.

Polybius wrote:The Prison Riot episode of that show, featuring a typically powerhouse performance from Charles S. Dutton, is considered something of a dress rehearsal for OZ

I wonder if this was behind why Dutton turns up in a single episode cameo at the beginning of season 2 of Oz, playing a prison inspector investigating the aftermath of the (first) riot that climaxed the previous season!

Polybius wrote:

domino harvey wrote: Watching the Wire or Law and Order was always a scavenger hunt of waiting for actors I know from Oz to show up.

You can do that with Homicide, as well.

The Prison Riot episode of that show, featuring a typically powerhouse performance from Charles S. Dutton, is considered something of a dress rehearsal for OZ.

J.K. Simmons' performance on the show (which I believe was part of the first cross-over with L&O) was basically his audition for Schillinger.

The first and by far the best of the crossovers.

Spoiler

"Don't you die on me you son of a bitch!!!"

The mighty Andre Braugher turning the death of a racist mass murderer on a dirty train platform into a gut wrenching tragedy.

I watched every episode from every season as it first aired. I thought that the first season was great, but the show got too outlandish as early as season two and only got progressively sillier from thereon out. In that season we get a main character killing someone with his long fingernails. Later on we get a black Travis Bickle, a clinical trial of an drug that turns you elderly over night, and a ghostly Luke Perry haunting the lead singer of Biohazard. Despite how over the top it became, I never could give it up though, and was actually pretty sad when the final episode aired.

Oh, and Domino, that was Detective Stabler's anus, not his rectum. The former is external, while the later is internal. [-X

You know, I'm okay with my error there

Dean Winters talks about his time on the show Aisha Tyler's recent episode of her podcast. A very interesting perspective.

Tom Fontana and David Simon are featured in a recent episode of The Writers Panel podcast, and Fontana talked about reviews. One in particular from TV Guide of this show's first season where the guy said "this was an offense to God". He fleshes it out a bit more but it's a funny story.

Big fan of OZ here too! I watched the whole show twice some years ago and it made a very strong impression on me.

It sure was ahead of its time in showing raw and brutal violence on tv, and at the same time this could have only been done on HBO who was always ahead of the other channels in therms of content. I always have in mind the fun fact of the Fox executives asking that the character of Bobbi Stakowski in Profit to be revised to his stepmother because an incestuous character would be too offensive... That would have been possible after OZ.

Even though it was a brutal show, I don't think it is its violence that makes it interesting or worthwhile (hell on the big screen and direct to VHS we've seen far worse already) but it's general tragic atmosphere. The whole show has a real depressive and utterly dark tone. The combination of hopelessness and political facts always made the show incredibly addictive, I loved how they tried to connect the Augustus speeches with the plot (even if they didn't always nail it).

And yes, I can't think of any character badly casted in Oz, excellent choice of actors, a few of the actors (like George Morfogen or Ernie Hudson) also appeared in St Elsewhere (where Fontana worked as a writer) ten years before Oz, I like to think it was no coincidence...

flyonthewall2983 wrote:Tom Fontana and David Simon are featured in a recent episode of The Writers Panel podcast, and Fontana talked about reviews. One in particular from TV Guide of this show's first season where the guy said "this was an offense to God".

It's a pretty solid bet that was Matt Roush, who always had a hate on for the show.

Feel like the Luke Perry storyline in the fifth season only works if you believe in a sympathetic God!

I must have had Season One for years - just getting to it tonight. The pilot episode is a stunner. All the comments here are on point but I think what makes most of the characters relatable is what Augustus said in ep. 1: the routine will kill you. So far it seems everyone, especially the more interesting characters, are busy trying to escape it - like it is for most outside. And, yes, the great cast really puts it over.