And like ‘Oh, that was so much fun to do and nobody is ever going to watch this.’Īnd so, to our surprise, people did watch it and there we were making another one and another one and another one.Ģ. It was so outrageous and there was so much that was going on that was never been done before on TV, that we would finish a scene and we would all laugh. Do you remember what you were thinking while you guys were doing the pilot?įontana: Well, the only thing we all thought was no one would ever watch the show. So my own work in the sense of the dialogue, I was like, ‘Eh, not so great’, but I think the heart of the show still beats very strong. Which I think 20 years ago was fairly unheard of. And I just watched the pilot again for the first time in 20 years and I was happy to see, most of all, how incredible the cast was and about the diversity in the show. Tom Fontana: You know, it’s funny because when you do something and then you go and revisit it 20 years later, you’re sort of terrified that it’s going to be crap. Q: What does it mean to you to look back at Oz after all these years today? The ongoing struggle to resist surrendering to impulses and urges that cause the evil that men do, in the one place you would least expect to find any light-in a sea of human misery and darkness.Tom Fontana | Andy Kropa/iStock/Getty Images A blend of black humor and outright horror, cutting commentary and the basest brutality, it is one of the very few shows being done now that can reveal the most majestic qualities of the human spirit. Augustus Hill, Simon Adebisi, Tobias Beecher, Vern Schillinger, Chris Keller, Jefferson Keane, Ryan O'Reilly, Kareem Said, Nino Schibetta, Bob Rebadow, Tim McManus, Warden Leo Glynn, Sister Peter-Marie, Father Ray, Officer Diane Wittlesey and all the others will imprint themselves on your memory and stay there, until you can't wait to find out what happens next.
It's rare television that makes you sit up, take notice, and actually care about even the minor characters in an ensemble such as this, no matter how heinous their crimes, or how street-and-battle-hardened their exteriors. Then I dare you to tear yourself away from it. I would strongly suggest that anyone who has not yet seen it give it a try, if you have HBO. The power this show has to polarize viewers into two different camps-love it or hate it-is proof enough that Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson, the forces behind HOMICIDE: LIFE ON THE STREETS, have fashioned something we haven't seen the likes of in a very long time. We have the "authorities" to take care of that, don't we? Exceptional art, no matter what the medium, has the ability to move us, make us think, make us feel both things we embrace and things we reject.
Using at times a sense of hyper-realism, (in the narrations of the excellent Harold Perrineau, who serves as the show's conscience and Greek chorus), OZ shows us both the profane and profound aspects of prison life that we good, law-abiding citizens don't like to think about. OZ tells it like it is, and baby, it ain't pretty. No SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION here, folks, no benevolent GREEN MILE guards or saintly supernatural inmates. if what you want is the usual depiction that passes for prison life in a dramatic format. and ties everything together really nicely. The whole thing is narrated and held together by inmates Augustus Hill, who provides the show with some context, some sense of theme, etc. Nathan), a nun/psychologist (Sister Peter Marie), a bunch of guards some honest, some crooked and of course the warden Leo Glynn. Besides the regular inmates, there's guest stars such as Method Man, Luke Perry, Master P, Treach, etc. And there's a great "everyman" character called Beecher who gives a good look at a normal man who made one tragic mistake. There's the gangstas (Adebisi, Wangler, Redding, Poet, Keene, Supreme Allah), Muslims (Said, Arif, Hamid Khan), Italians (Pancamo, Nappa, Schiebetta), bikers (Hoyt), Aryans (Schillinger, Robson, Mark Mack), Christians (Cloutier, Cudney), Latinos (Alvarez, Morales, Guerra, Hernandez), gays (Hanlon, Cramer) and a whole pile of others (the O'Riley brothers, Keller, Stanislovsky, etc.). There have been many groups of inmates during the run of the show and not everybody makes it out alive.
OZ chronicles the attempts of McManus (Terry Kinney) to keep control over the inmates of Em(erald) City as well as the drug trade and the violence.
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