Oz: HBO’s Original Masterpiece

If you’re a fan of this channel, you’ll know how much I love the Sopranos. I’ve talked at length about how influential the show is in not only cementing HBO’s legacy as a network, but also kickstarting the Golden age of Television dramas. But as many people have rightly pointed out, The Sopranos was not the first drama HBO ever made. That honor goes to Oz.

Created by Tom Fontana, Oz is a prison drama that premiered on HBO in 1997, two years before The Sopranos. It followed the lives of various inmates and staff at the Oswald State Penitentiary. Running for 6 seasons, the series was known for its graphic violence and depictions of nudity, two things that HBO would become known for. However Oz would also pioneer the gritty and realistic storytelling that would go on to inspire a generation of great television like The Sopranos and The Wire.

Now to be clear there were shows on HBO before Oz. Comedies like the Larry Sanders Show, and even dramas like Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. They even had a prison drama before Oz called Maximum Security. But for all intents and purposes, the Golden Age of television dramas began on July 12, 1997 with the premier of Oz.

I’m really excited that I finally get to cover this series in a retrospective. Not only to give it the credit it deserves as the first real HBO drama, but also because Oz was actually the first HBO show I ever watched, even before the Sopranos. I watched it all the way back when I was a young kid; yes just like George Michael in Arrested Development.

However rather than being scared, I was fascinated. This was my first look into a gritty show like this. And while yes the extreme content of the series sometimes disturbed me, I was also blown away by the complex characters and the unique storytelling style. Oz was one of the first shows that influenced my love of crime dramas, and it’s what would lead me into other shows like The Sopranos.

So in this video, let’s take a look at Oz: the original HBO masterpiece.

Like I said the series is set in the Oswald State Penitentiary, a level 4 maximum security prison. The nickname of the prison and title of the series draws on The Wizard of Oz, using the whimsical imagery of the film and book to contrast the brutal world of the show. The main cell block, nicknamed the Emerald City or Em City, is an experiment unit. Designed by the naively optimistic Tim McManus, it is an attempt to bring different groups of prisoners together to try and better rehabilitate them.

However prison life isn’t so peaceful, and the various prisoners of Oz fight among themselves for money, power, or just personal grievances. The show follows a number of these diverse and fascinating characters. Tobias Beecher, the fish out of water lawyer who is sent to Oz for killing a girl while drunk driving. Ryan O’Riley, the Irish machiavellian manipulator of the series. Miguel Alvarez, a Latino gangbanger with a good heart who constantly finds himself making the wrong choices. Kareem Said, the charismatic and prideful Imam of the Muslims. And Vern Schillinger, the terrifying leader of the Aryan Brother who serves as the central antagonist of the series.

Now not all the characters on Oz are really fleshed out. Some are just there to fill out the prison roster, and others have strange or half baked character arcs. Some characters are introduced simply to kill them in shocking and sensational ways. But when the characters work they really work, and even more minor characters get to have moments of great development.

One of these characters is Augustus Hill, a paralyzed former drug dealer. In the show itself, Hill is a side character, having some stories but not really being a major character in the series. However Hill also serves as the narrator of the series, breaking the fourth wall by delivering monologues to the audience between scenes, usually with thematic relevance to the episode itself.

This narration is a little weird when you think about it. This isn’t like House of Card where the main character breaks the fourth wall to deliver his thoughts. Like I said Hill is a side character, and as the show goes on the monologues become more detached from him as a character. After his death in the fifth season, they even bring back dead characters from the series to serve as guest narrators. The monologues are often very surreal as well, using different angles and props from the normal series.

And this isn’t the only unique aspect of the show. Oz employed a lot of experimental stuff in the series, including a musical episode where characters sang in elaborate sequences. The show often used various visual effects in its storytelling, and was recorded on handheld cameras which gave the show a very unique documentary feel. They even pioneered the idea of killing your main character off. In fact they killed off the character you thought would be the main character, Dino Ortolani, in the very first episode. Eat your heart out Game of Thrones.

However the strangest thing about Oz is some of its story choices. We have to acknowledge that for as gritty as the show is in portraying how brutal prison life can be, it’s not a very realistic show. Prisoners and even guards and civilians are killed indiscriminately in Oz, and there is rarely any consequences. A prisoner can stab someone to death in front of everyone, and then a few days later they’re let out of the hole cause Tim McManus believes they’re really trying to change this time.

Also despite being a brutal prison drama, the show can get quite surreal and even campy at times. This is one of the biggest criticisms of the show. As the seasons went on, the storylines started getting weirder and weirder. A subplot about using aging pills to speedrun prisoners through their sentences. A ghost haunting and processing men to commit murder. A beta male like Tim McManus constantly getting laid. All of these are very unbelievable plot points.

I was originally planning on criticizing the show because of this. My thought at the time was that Oz was a show like Dexter or Prison Break that just gradually got more silly as it went on in order to make increasingly dramatic television. However while doing research for this video, I came across this article by Robert Humphrey. In it he argued that Oz isn’t meant to be viewed as a realistic portrayal of prison, but instead should be viewed as a kind of experimental theater.

There is actually a lot of evidence for this being the intent of the show. Tom Fontana came from a playwriting background, and brought those sensibilities to Oz. Hill narrating to the audience serves like the chorus in Greek plays, commenting on the action and informing the audience about information they need to understand the themes.

There's also the Macbeth play that the prisoners put on in Season 6. The play within a play is a trope that Shakespeare used in Hamlet, and the show draws attention to how the storyline in Macbeth mirrors storylines in the show.

The series finale is titled Exeunt Omnes, which is stage direction for all the actors to exit the stage. In the finale Oz is contaminated and all the remaining characters are forced to leave the prison, the metaphorical stage they’ve been performing on.

The over the top and schlocky nature of the show is thus an intentional part of the storytelling. Just like in other stage productions, these surreal elements are meant to create a world within the medium itself, separate from our own. We can even compare it to the Wizard of Oz, the namesake of the show, which also used surreal imagery to create a distinct mood and setting.

In the finale monologue from Hill, he asks what the point of Oz even was? He outright says that the plot of the show doesn’t matter, and that instead the point of the story was to show who these characters are and why they did the things that they do. It’s a very poignant way to wrap up the series, and I’m sure it served as an inspiration for how other shows like The Sopranos or The Wire would comment on the nature of their storytelling.

Overall I think this is a really fascinating way to look at the show, and it certainly makes me have a greater appreciation for the series. However a different argument you could make for the wacky writing of the later seasons is the fact that Tom Fontana is credited as having written every episode of the series himself.

Now Fontana is a television work horse. He had previously created Homicide, the predecessor to The Wire, and was heavily involved with the writing of that show as well. However I’ve never heard of a showrunner writing the entirety of a show before, even though some would like you to think that they did. Now for some of the episodes of Oz he has a co-writer, however he wrote the majority of the show’s 56 episodes himself alone. This might explain why the writing seemed to dip over time. Fontana might have just been struggling to come up with new ideas.

This is especially true in Season 4, which is twice as long as the normal 8 episode seasons, and where many fans think the show went down in quality. The reason for the expansion was because the Sopranos, which had started a few years after Oz, had a delay in filming its 3rd season. HBO decided to fill the gap in scheduling with basically another season of Oz, though I have a feeling they combined all the episodes into a single season in order to avoid having to pay the actors more money. They would do the exact same thing on the sixth season of the Sopranos.

Now there are many examples of story decisions that were driven by necessity rather than creativity. The episode “Variety” in Season 5 with the musical numbers for example was done because actor Harrold Perrineau was busy filming the Matrix. The explosion at the end of Season 4 was done because the show lost its lease and had to rebuild the set at a new location, using the renovations as an excuse for why Oz looked slightly different after that. All of this is completely normal for a television series, but it shows you that writing wasn’t always intentional, but often a result of circumstances.

And I don’t think the plot holes and the goofy tone are the only flaws in the writing. Despite the premise of the show being an experimental unit designed for rehabilitation, the show doesn’t actually have that much to say about prison reform or larger social issues. Like Hill monologues about the problems with prison and society in general, but those ideas are not reflected in the narrative itself. We don’t see the ideas of prison reform play out in the story, at least not in the way that The Wire would tackle the issues of the War on Drugs. Fontana himself would admit that he was focused more on making engaging stories than tackling larger thematic issues, which is fair but I still think the show could have done more given its premise.

Oz is without a doubt a rough show. There are many elements which feel dated nowadays, and many things that we can look back on and think that they could have handled better. However we have to give Oz the credit it deserves for breaking down the doors and paving the way for the Golden age of television. Without Oz pioneering the style of the gritty HBO style drama, we would never have had shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, or even Breaking Bad. It’s a show that many people rightly look back on great fondness, and possibly might get to see again.

At the end of the series when they have to leave Oz, McManus says that they will be back one day. Fans have hoped that this line meant that the show would return one day, either as a series or a followup movie. Neither of these ever materialized, however 4 months ago, 21 years after the finale aired, Fontana released a short film titled Zo, with the tagline “what happens once you’re free?”. The film doesn’t directly name anything from Oz, and I don’t think HBO had anything to do with this film. However it features Lee Tergesen and Dean Winters in roles that are obviously meant to reference their roles in Oz.

According to Kirk Acevedo who played Miguel Alvarez on the show, if there was enough interest in the short then we might see a potential sequel series. I’m not sure how effective it was given the view count on Youtube, but the film also premiered at the ATX film festival, so maybe it generated more buzz among critics and studio executives. So who knows, one day we might finally get our Return to Oz.

Regardless though I hope you enjoyed this retrospective. Like I said Oz was my first introduction to serialized dramas, and I was absolutely hooked. Revisiting the show for this video just reminded me about my love for the series, and I’m glad I got to shed some light on it after all this time. If you enjoyed this type of content by sure to subscribe, and stay tuned for more videos coming soon!