OZ: The Complete First Season

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

It’s a gutsy move to kill off your main character at the end of the pilot episode, but as anyone who has seen it knows, Oz is not your typical television show. A collective nightmare inside the walls of the Oswald Maximum Security Correctional Facility, Oz is like a drug-induced fever dream that offers moments of clarity and power in between a barrage of drugs, sex, and violence. Lots and lots of violence.

It might be an odd comment, but each of Oz’s episodes are very episodic; very rarely does one plotline get followed until the end of the episode. What binds each episode is not the plot but the theme, which is the only show I know of to do that. One episode is a rumination of faith, one a rumination of addiction – brilliantly glued together by Harold Perinneau (The Matrix sequels, Lost) as the narrator.

Yes, our trip through hell is unofficially led by the wheelchair-bound Augustus Hill (Perinneau). The eyes, ears, and voice of the show, Hill narrates with an always-brilliant prose poem style that at once grounds us and never lets us feel too content.

With a large and often revolving cast, you’ll see many familiar faces. Aside from Perinneau, his fellow Lost castaway Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje plays an inmate, as does character actor J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man, Law & Order), having a truly devish time as a white supremacist. The Sopranos’ Edie Falco plays a prison guard, and Law & Order: SVU’s B.D. Wong shows up as a priest. Even Rita Moreno, as good as ever, shows up playing the prison’s drug counselor. And everyone is always under the watchful eye of the tired warden Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson) and the more optimistic idealistic manager Tim McManus (Terry Kinney).

Looking up the show’s history, I was surprised to find it debuted on HBO in 1997, making it HBO’s first ever one-hour drama – two years before the channel’s much splashier hit The Sopranos. The reason Oz never broke into mainstream consciousness like that show is because its strengths, of course, are also its weaknesses. To some people, this will be the best show on television, and HBO should be applauded for nurturing it through its six-season run.

But the majority of people out there will be turned off by the always-graphic nature of the show, which includes a guy in a drug-induced sleep getting his face lit on fire, and a guy unwillingly getting a swastika burned onto his buttocks. (Come to think of it, those are both in the same episode.) And that’s not to mention full-frontal nudity of pretty much every male cast member on the show.

More than the nudity and violence, however (this is HBO, after all), there’s the claustrophobia. Oz’s claustrophobia – its brilliant, stark, hopeless feeling of constant enclosure – nonetheless makes it hard to get through. In a sense, you might ...