Oz is the Best TV Show That You'll Probably Never Watch

(CW: discussion of SA, prison, violence, institutional violence, racism, etc.)

 

Alright, here's a little quiz. Imagine a TV show that contains everything I'm about to list, and guess when it was aired:

• Diverse cast including black, AAPI, Latine, etc. actors
  
• Prominent epic mlm romance
• Multiple queer main characters
  
• Multiple disabled main characters
  
• Multiple male main characters who are victims of rape
• Nazis/white supremacists as bad guys; punching and killing of Nazis
  
• Exploration of issues affecting prisoners, such as prison rape, prison labor, "cruel and unusual punishment," the death sentence, solitary, voting, and so on
• Focus on institutional and structural failures leading to oppression
  

You got your guess in? Good. Now scroll down.

Oz premiered on HBO on July 12, 1997, and ran until February 23, 2003. It contains all this, and multitudes more that I can hardly remember after a single viewing. I only heard of it and decided to watch it because 1. Dave from Dopey said he loved it 2. due to a brief mention in the book Difficult Men by Brett Martin. I don't think I personally know anyone who has watched this show.

When Tim and I started Oz, we had no idea what to expect. After the first episode, we were intrigued. Then, somewhere in the second episode, which discusses the way prison deprives one of sexual expression and affection, then intensifies the stakes by having the New York governor remove prisoners' right to conjugal visits (a right which is never restored in the entire series), we fell in love. By the end of Season 1, which climaxes with an epically filmed prison riot, Tim and I were in awe. For the rest of the six seasons of the show, we repeatedly reached the end of episodes and ranted and raved about how, "No one is watching this show, no one is ever going to watch this show, WHY IS NO ONE WATCHING OZ?"

I'm coming in hot shortly after finishing the series finale of Oz, here to write an impassioned appeal as to why more people should be watching this show, to unironically, maybe even cringily state that I think Oz is one of the best TV shows of all time. No one is going to ever watch it, no matter how much I shout, and that is a real tragedy.

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Those of you who know a bit of TV history, at least enough to know of the The New/Second/Third Golden Age of Television, will notice that premiere date, which puts Oz before Sex and the City, The Wire, and The Sopranos. Basically, it came before the prestige drama format -- ~13 episodes per season, high falutin' themes, big stars, season-long arcs, lots of characters, moral ambiguity -- all the stuff that makes your favorites like Game of Thrones or Succession or Breaking Bad tick.

Oz has accurately been called a proto-prestige drama. Content-wise, acting-wise, structure-wise, it's somewhere between a community theater production and a Twin Peaks style soap opera combined with a dinosaur-ish almost-prestige drama sensibility. No, no, don't run away yet! I know this mishmash sounds weird but I promise you this one of Oz's strengths -- it'll just take a while to explain.

One of the most prominent features of Oz is Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), a prisoner who is wheelchair bound after he was thrown off a roof by the cops who arrested him. He is not only a character, but the show's narrator, popping up between scenes to talk into the camera about whatever subject ties this episode together. Sex, shanks, cruel and unusual punishment, apocalypses, childhood trauma, religion, garbage; no subject is off-limits, including criticism of the prison system itself, complete with statistics. These rants are sometimes incoherent, sometimes so incisive and boundary-pushing that my jaw dropped on more than one occasion. With this, he explains the world of Oswald State Penitentiary (its nickname, Oz, being the name of the series), the despair and irony and danger of prison life.

In Season 1, Augustus is often filmed in a replica of one of the glass cells that characterize the experimental prison unit, called Emerald City, where the majority of the action takes place. In the cell with him are a bed and a toilet -- for in Oz, as in many prisons, there is no privacy for either shitting or sleeping.

While Augustus speechifies, the cell often spins around and around, turning him end over and end, while he cranes and twists to keep speaking into the camera. It's an image that will stick with me forever: Augustus in his wheelchair, being flipped over and over as prisoners wander the common area of Em City below him. The speed is fast, but not too fast, regular but disorienting. "In Oz," (a common sentence starter for Augustus), you are not meant to have stability. You have get used to the washing-machine-tumble of daily life, the deliberateness of punishment that makes you feel overwhelmed, afraid, dizzy from constantly trying to adjust.

 The inimitable Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) spitting truths from his spinning cell.

This applies to the experience of watching Oz as well. Rather than having an A plot and a B plot and C plot intertwining over the course of the hour, all the plots in Oz happen in chunks. First up, let's see what's happening with (the incredibly hot) Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker) for three to ten minutes, then let's get the update on Ryan O'Reily (Dean Winters) and his brother Cyril (Scott William Winters), then let's see what's going on with the prison administration -- and so on. The most intense or thematically relevant plot line is generally reserved for last, with Augustus saying one last thing to usher in or cap off a final cliffhanger/devastating moment.

This takes some getting used to. One effect of this structure is that plot beats happen at a breakneck pace. Someone is going to have a trial for their appeal: the next scene is the trial for their appeal. Someone is going to have surgery, or has implied they're going to kill someone: next scene is surgery, murder, whatever totally bonkers next move would normally be reserved for Act 3 of a normal prestige drama episode. As the show goes on, the plots become more intertwined and the segments bleed and tangle with each other. Somehow, it works: the turmoil is constant for each character, the plot beats hit like so many rounds of ammo. It's endlessly engaging, and since there's no beating around the bush, a huge amount of drama and content and commentary can be fit into a single episode.

This, with Oz's ever-complexifying, highly dramatic, and violent content, creates a Shepherd Tone effect, where the tension is perpetually rising with each murder and feud and fight. Yet, somehow, when they want to pull out the stops, they do, creating moments of explosive drama so intense, so incredibly shot and choreographed, that I will never forget them so long as I have a working brain. Sure, it can all be a bit bonkers, implausible, off the wall, but holy shit -- I can't even describe some of these moments and how they made me feel, because that would be giving away spoilers!

Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), one of my favorite characters, looking like a Renaissance painting.

Another central feature of Oz is the devout "anyone can die" approach. They did it before Game of Thrones, and to great effect: the premise is the dangerous conditions of prison, where you can get killed by your fellow inmates, the universally corrupt guards, inadequate medical care, even by the building itself. The first episode takes pains to set this up, introducing Dino Ortolani (Jon Seda) as a main character, a troubled individual with the ability to improve, only to kill him, gruesomely, at the end of the episode.

The churn of introduction and death is so constant that Tim and I liked to place bets on how long a new character would last when introduced (this is a lot of fun, I recommend it). Sometimes they would be offed before we could even place our bets, their intricate lives cut off unceremoniously, sometimes we would watch as seemingly minor characters evolved into people we cherished and rooted for or hated with fiery passion.

And oh, the characters! I've seen the complaint that the characters in Oz are one-dimensional, and I can only assume the people saying this didn't watch very much of it. There are so many interesting and dynamic characters in Oz that I don't even know where to start. Aggressive bisexual Simon Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and his many manipulations, the constant question of what in him is genuine and what is yet another illusion; Tobias Beecher's (Lee Tergersen) unending struggle with eminently hateable Nazi rapist and iconic villain Vern Schillinger (JK Simmons), which becomes a struggle with his own awakened hunger for violence, his desire for forgiveness, and his sexuality; Ryan O'Reily's tenderness and cold-hearted manipulativeness, which often become one and the same, especially when it comes to his brain-damaged brother, Cyril; Kareem Said's grappling with his faith, with the desires that contradict his faith, his search for a balance between righteousness and ego; Miguel Alvarez's (Kirk Acevedo) convoluted path towards redemption; Dr. Gloria Nathan's (Lauren Vélez) burden of trauma, how she fights for her ethics in an unethical world.

All that and I haven't even mentioned Oz's clergy and staff, the prophet who speaks to god, the tunnel-digger, the manipulative mastermind bisexual maybe-maybe not serial killer, the various drug dealers and kingpins, the drug addled poet, the televangelist, the sole woman on death row, the horrible Nazi whose internal life is suddenly explored in the final season, and so on. I failed to even describe a few of my favorites -- that's how vast and complex this show is.

Vernon Schillinger (JK Simmons), one of the most compelling television villains ever, playing Macbeth in the final episode of Oz.

There are those who will criticize some of the acting in Oz -- it's overacted, overdramatic, they hired too many theater actors. I couldn't disagree more strongly. There's something to it, this community theater vibe, with the dramatic bongos accentuating every plot beat, the characters soliloquizing into perfectly cast beams of light, the screaming and intense stares and nose-to-nose arguments, the way you can imagine the sets being transferred onto a stage.

I could theorize about the way that Oz depicts prison life as a performance -- people pretending to be untouchable, likeable, scary, innocent, guilty, all the deceptions needed to get by, while the real drama happens with their inner selves -- and I think that would be correct on a thematic level. But really, if you can make yourself comfortable with the cheese, there is so much to be gained -- not just from the actually incredible performances from the whole cast, but from the cheese itself.

All that being said, the cinematography is accomplished, despite the fact that this show has never been remastered. Actors emerge from shadows into puddles of light, or disappear; the background is used to maximum effect to show who is watching, listening, noticing; characters speak to each other through mirrors, bars, glass, their reflections and framing showing who is free and who is not, who is alienated and who is present, who is trying to connect with whom. The world within Oswald's walls is artificial, claustrophobic, crowded, brutalist, unpleasant, lacking in beauty or privacy. Beyond flashbacks to characters' crimes, we rarely get to see outside Oz, and with good reason: when you are a prisoner, prison is the world.

So, for all the soap opera ridiculousness that Oz can sometimes veer into, the show reeks of thematic content. As the show tumbles on, and the prison staff continue to display an astonishing lack of competency and moral solvency, a deeper meaning becomes clear: all this drama is caused by the incompetency, the lack of care, the dehumanization, and boredom of prison. Surely Oz is the most dramatic prison on earth, just as Grey's Anatomy features the most disaster-struck hospital in the world, and Walter White is the most outsized meth cook in the world, but, let's be honest, almost all TV shows -- especially prestige dramas -- rely on heightened action to make their points.

 

The O'Reily brothers, Ryan and Cyril, played by actual brothers Dean and Scott William Winters.

Within this overarching theme, there's more: revenge and forgiveness and redemption, how to love in terrible conditions, the various ways power is established and enforced, the question of what is deserved and what no one could possibly deserve.

Talking specifics, there's Cyril's arc, which probably involves a lot of egregious misportrayal of people with brain injuries, but which nonetheless distills the idea that prison isn't good for anyone, that even an innocent would be turned violent and reactive by these conditions.

There's a brief and oft-criticized arc about an experimental drug used to advance prisoners to the physical age they would be at the time of their release, allowing for early release. Though the showrunners half-assed this plot, it still opened the question of what the point of prison is: is it right to take years of peoples' lives as penance, does that make any sense?

This plot is just a subset of the long-running critique of the death sentence, which asks what purpose it serves, whether it makes sense to enact it on the mentally ill (which is everyone on death row), whether the accidental justice of prison violence is any different from the institutional justice of the death sentence.

There's close examination of the lives of prison employees, how some derive sadistic benefits from their work, how some are corrupted by it, how some are traumatized by it. The show lays out, through many different character arcs, the way systems of power not only dehumanize the oppressed, but also those in power, some of whom become craven and lacking in empathy, some of whom find their empathy abused and crushed by their place in the pecking order.

The script also often plays with the idea that, in the areas where no one is surveilling, where guards can be bought out, crime and violence is basically condoned. The administrators never try to stop it, they just try to harness or control it, or tamp it down for the sake of their own careers. Thus, banal, institutional evil is compared with with illegal evils, and their symbiosis is laid open.

I could go on all day, so I hope this is sampler enough. Suffice to say, there was so much I feel I barely took in all that Oz had to offer on a first watch.

Simon Adebisi, the original chaotic bisexual and evil mastermind.

Now, I've talked up this show a lot and I have to confess some shortcomings. First, and most simply of all, yeah, sometimes the writing is bad. Some characters are introduced, have no point, and disappear. Some plots appear and dwindle away like a sigh (though, just as often, the showrunners let you know episodes, even seasons later, that they didn't forget after all, and they will finally bring that thing you've been wondering about to a head). People will get seriously injured, then be fine in two episodes, with no lasting marks. But, in my opinion, the good outweighs the bad, and the bad is at least kinda funny.

Also, for all its progressiveness, Oz was made in the late 90s and early 2000s. It hasn't aged well in some areas. Augustus and Cyril are played by able-bodied actors, Cyril's portrayal is dubious at best, and almost every character says the n-word or some other slur at some point, regardless of their race (though this arguably imparts a level of unpleasant realism, especially when it comes to the Aryan Brotherhood). It's complicated, as any piece of media is, regardless of it's age, and you have to be willing to shake off fair amount of microaggressions and questionable representation to get through the show.

In addition, there are some facets of the show that give a real "your mileage may vary" quality, though I'd argue that this comes with the territory of prestige dramas. However, my opinion is that, in comparison to many prestige dramas, these are features, not bugs or hollow marketing gimmicks: they are part of what makes the point of Oz.

First of all, there is the violence, which is constant, often excessive, and which sometimes results in hokey practical effects (though IMO, if bad effects work puts you off a movie or TV show, you're missing the point). I've alluded to this a lot already, but the violence is the point: the cheapness of life in prison, the multifarious way death affects other people, the way people will talk as if someone deserved it, and so on.

Then there is the constant male full frontal nudity, which I imagine makes some uncomfortable. To be clear: there is a lot of dick and balls, all the time. The fun thing is that you get to see famous actors hang dong, especially Christopher Meloni, who seems perfectly happy to be filmed naked, pissing on camera, showing his butthole, etc., all while he was working at the same time on Law and Order: SVU.

 

My favorite gays, Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergeson) and Chris Keller (Christopher Meloni). This is during Tobias' unhinged weird facial hair phase.

But, of course, the nudity in Oz is pointed. Early on, we see Augustus naked and having sex with his wife shortly before his injury and arrest, then we see the special intimacy he has with his wife during his conjugal visit, in which they must accommodate his disability. My memory is hazy, but by my recollection, Augustus is describing the wonders of sex and intimacy, heavy with the implication of what is lost when you are in prison.

Indeed, privacy and intimacy are rare in Oswald State Penitentiary. Characters are most often seen naked in the showers, where they are distinctly vulnerable, and when they are thrown in "the Hole," a cold, empty cell with a single bucket which prisoners are forced into as punishment for misbehavior. Shots of the characters getting thrown into the Hole are especially brutal -- they stumble in, junk jiggling and flailing, colliding with the filthy walls. The door slams shut behind them and the slot window slides shut.

Oz is quick to address the fact that part of the punishment of prison is that your right to bodily privacy and enjoyment of intimacy is stripped from you. You must shower in public, shit in public, masturbate in public. Romantic and sexual moments are stolen in odd corners or at night, in your cell which has no protection except the cover of darkness. The guards could come along and break it up at any moment. There is even a plot in which a character gets certain privileges which no one else has -- one of these is that he is allowed to hang up sheets in his cell, shielding his activities from everyone else.

At the intersection between violence and nudity is all the rape. There is a lot of it -- talk of it, and several graphic depictions -- in all its flavors. Schillinger and his "prags" are a constant staple of the show, multiple characters are brutally raped on screen, and at one point a flashback depicts a rape perpetrated on a woman by two characters who wind up in Oz for that crime.

I am a survivor of sexual assault, and I found this shocking and hard to watch at times. But, now that I am more recovered than I used to be, I believe that the main criteria for a tasteful depiction of rape is that it have a point. And Oz is certainly making a point, showing how rape can be a power play, a cycle of abuse, a status symbol, a currency, a means of fucked up self-protection. The actual scenes of assault tend to be filmed to emphasize the victim's experience and point of view, making it clear who we're sympathizing with.

In the last season, there is an exploration of one character's relationship with rape, both as perpetrator and victim, which eventually involves a rape survivors therapy group. It was this that convinced me that, for all its splashiness and shock value, Oz's handling of rape is surprisingly sensitive and nuanced.

This is Oz's fatal flaw. It is so intense and weird that it is genuinely hard to recommend. Your average viewer faces so many contraindications that they might just give up. But also, it is beautiful and thoughtful, delivering drama and daring themes in equal measure. If you can do it, I am waving my arms, yelling, screaming at you, "IT'S WORTH IT! FUCKING DO IT! I DARE YOU! DON'T DEPRIVE YOURSELF! EVERY EPISODE OF OZ IS THE BEST EPISODE OF OZ EVER!"