Nowadays, it is easy to look back on HBO and consider them as the all time greats in revolutionizing the hour long drama with shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire. In fact, all praise is earned with an inimitable amount of quality that is commercial-free and allowed to go into dark and perverse corners of the market. To look back at their origin with Oz in 1997 is to notice something more appalling and disturbing. For all of the edginess and controversy that the network would spark later on in their existence, nothing really compares to the brutal and explicit nature that defines the core of Oz. It may be the most vulgar and uncomfortable show in their catalog even 18 years on. That is why it is both a testament and a fault to note that Oz may go down as the most challenging show to watch.
The series followed inmates at an experimental ward at Oswald Correctional Facility, known more commonly as Oz (yes, there's plenty of Wizard of Oz allegories early on) as narrated by Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) with an oddly sadistic poetry to his intervals. While it doesn't follow the specific rules of prison dramas, it creates a community full of various races, skinheads and religious people who must coexist. It often skips from one plot to another, rarely allowing one to feel stale. Over the course of any episode, the stories could revolve around five or more stories, technically combined by Hill's narration. From the opening episode's raw, handheld feel, the show feels dangerous and wants you to resent it. Over the course of six seasons, it achieves it in a lot of initially compelling and eventually regrettable ways.
One of Oz's greatest triumphs is that it managed to find danger at every turn. While it managed to sympathize characters who were essentially murderers, it also relied on hierarchy. With occasional exits into a broader study of prisoner treatment and government spending, the show could at times feel more important than it was, choosing to not pull back from the hostile people that were ignored. The show featured consistent deaths and found clever ways to keep the audience cringing. In some cases, it was too perverse and explicit. With the show already being a dour series of events, to add tragedy is to make it uncomfortable.
However, the one aspect that HBO rightfully picked up from Tom Fontana's show is that it pushed buttons constantly. If it wasn't murdering someone, there was plenty of typical prison tropes. There was plenty of male nudity in the showers and yes, rape. Early on it was a coherent study of masculinity that quickly devolved into a messy, violent soap opera occasionally going to bittersweet places and others painfully stupid. By the time the show ended its run, there was a sense that even HBO was tired of it. It was entering a time when its indie aesthetics were becoming outdated. Considering its hostile structure, it makes plenty of sense why the show's accessibility faded over time. While its themes and cast began to become soaked into other shows (most notably Edie Falco into The Sopranos and half of the cast of The Wire), it continued to linger on as this experiment into seeing how long you could last. It felt hellish, which may have been its intentions all along. Still, it is a miserable show to watch in its entirety.
This isn't to discredit its strengths. Yes, its choice to use jarring sound effects and invert images make be low tech, but it did manage to make the society function as a whole. It was often done in a ridiculous fashion that didn't make sense, but lead by Warden Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson), the subtext began to form. Everyone became sympathized and soon the most inconsequential of characters felt important. While some took higher precedence, the fact that the show was able to continually revisit various characters over eight episode seasons is a thankless task. Even at its worst, which was towards the middle of its run, it was ambitious in painting the prisoners from every potential angle. There was a sense of redemption mixed in with the violent fate. The only issues often were in pacing and camera techniques, which grew redundant after a few seasons.
As a whole, Oz is likely only a show worth noting because of how it launched HBO: the flagship for modern drama. It is hard to fully appreciate it in hindsight because of how aggressively it shifts the audience into discomfort while exploring every taboo theme imaginable in a faux societal structure. Yes, it helped to launch the network and many noteworthy careers. Still, it is both the most indicative and alienated of the HBO shows because unlike everything since, it never really gained the respect largely thanks to its off putting nature that still packs punches. It deserves some attention, at least for a few seasons, for creating the modern drama mold with massive casts and overlapping stories. If you are capable of handling 56 hours of gluttonous misery in a prison drama, then this might be halfway decent. Though be warned. It is likely to rattle and disturb alongside provoke.
Overall Rating: 3.5 out of 5
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