‘Oz is hard times doing hard time...’
If you were to ask 100 pop culture obsessives to name their Mount Rushmore of prestige television, most of them would reach for The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and one other. Game of Thrones, perhaps. Succession maybe. It’s safe to say you’d have to get pretty far down the list before you reached Oz. The point being, despite predating all the shows listed above, Oz has never truly been given its flowers…
Created by Tom Fontana, Oz tells the story of Oswald State Correctional Facility, and more specifically, a special wing of the prison affectionately known as Emerald City. Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson) is the warden. Tim McManus (Terry Kinney) presides over Em City. While the cast is disparate and ever-changing across the show’s 56-episode, five-season run, the mainstays include Harold Perrineau as the show’s narrator and heartbeat, Augustus Hill, Kirk Acevedo as troubled Latino prisoner, Miguel Alvarez, and Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Perhaps the main thrust of the show, however, is the rivalry between white supremacist Vernon Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) and disgraced lawyer Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen).
It took me a while to get into Oz because its narrative structure and storytelling techniques are so unique. This is a show where the violence is unpredictable, spontaneous and intense, the relationships between the prisoners are ever-changing and volatile, and, crucially, the guards are often just as flawed and unhappy as the prisoners. It is this last observation that pushes Oz into being something that is great rather than merely good. Sure, some of what we see pushes the envelope in terms of credulity, but on the whole, the tinderbox atmosphere created here feels like an accurate representation of life inside a maximum security prison in America in the ’90s. By the end, I had become so invested in the life of these men that I was racing through the final season to reach the conclusion.
In some ways, I can see why Oz has never achieved the widespread recognition that some of the other TV shows from this era have. It is incredibly violent and bleak throughout. And I mean unrelentingly bleak. Brutality, psychological torment and sexual assault are regular occurrences in Em City and Fontana never shies away from depicting these acts of degradation. Viewers also have to contend with the fact that, apart from a scene or two here and there, we never leave the prison. For 56 episodes, we are trapped in the Oswald State Correctional Facility right along with the prisoners. It’s claustrophobic and suffocating, but also rewarding for those who can stomach all the savagery.
Oz is tough to stomach sometimes, but so is life. This is just about as good as television gets.
