This ain’t Kansas
Defunct prison drama Oz is still appealing
Jeanne Fronda Staff
The mob show The Sopranos is all the rage, what with its two-year hiatus between seasons and a trophy shelf exploding with TV awards. But HBO’s first stab at a TV series, the prison drama Oz (1997 – 2002), is what viewers should really be watching if they’re looking for a few “stand-up” guys.
Admittedly, trying to understand Oz is pretty discouraging for those who don’t know the difference between “jizz” and “Jaz.” Pretending to know the subtleties that affect the lives of prisoners and staff who live in the fictional world of the Oswald State Correctional Facility (Oz for short) isn’t as easy as getting thrown into a segregation cell (Ad Seg, for those newbies to the land of Oz). Even though the now defunct prison show, which had its sixth and final season air in 2002, was always overshadowed by HBO’s The Sopranos, the show still has a cult following; fans illegally traded VHS tapes of the show’s episodes for six years before it was finally released on DVD in 2002.
Maybe it was Oz’s blitz of graphic images, such as a man facedown on a metal kitchen counter getting raped or a prisoner drinking his own urine out of a milk jug, that didn’t sit too well with Sopranos lovers, viewers who prefer to watch a mob boss sit in a comfy armchair and discuss his feelings with his shrink. (Snooze.)
But even if you’re not prepared for an overnight cell lockdown with HBO’s prison drama, here are some quick notes about the production to show all you “gee-The-Sopranos-is-godfather-of-all-cable-shows” wiseguys what you’re missing out on.
1) Oz meets Beverly Hills, 90210 and other celeb encounters. Okay, so Oz is more than boy-meets-boy-cut-to-happy-ending-in-a-bunk-bed; it’s about getting some famous heartthrobs and celebs on the small screen. Luke Perry of Beverly Hills, 90210 fame (he played Dylan McKay) served a sentence on cable TV’s most beloved cellblock. Perry played a bearded reverend who eventually has to get buck naked..
Blue-eyed sit-com actor Brian Bloom of Who’s the Boss? fame also had a short sentence in the Oz slammer. Other cool celebs who wandered into the clink: NBA basketball player Rick Fox; movie star and Julia Roberts’s brother Eric Roberts; rappers LL Cool J, Treach, Method Man and Pepa (who played a correctional officer); bassist-singer Evan Seinfeld of Biohazard (who played prisoner Jaz Hoyt) and drummer Peter Criss of KISS. (Now that’s a rockin’ jailhouse.)
2) Full frontal male nudity. Bada Bing!, the strip club owned by Tony Soprano, is where you go if you’re looking for some bare-breasted strippers wearing four-inch spike heels. However, Emerald City, Oz’s experimental unit that features glass windows instead of steel bars to designate cells or pods, is where you go to get an eyeful of the whole “meat and potatoes.” It’s rare to see male nudity in mainstream productions, but for Oz it’s pretty much a requirement. There are loads of places to see some brawny men in their full birthday suits: the communal shower room, the gym area and let’s not forget Administrative Segregation (Ad Seg), where the boys are tossed after they’ve been caught behaving badly. There, each prisoner is thrown in completely naked and only has two buckets to keep him company — one for urine, the other for feces. (Hmm, I’ll bet a neon orange jumpsuit starts to look pretty fashionable once you’ve been in Ad Seg for a few hours.)
3) And for you nerdy bookish types: Shakespearean allusions. The magical land of Oz is narrated by prisoner Augustus Hill (played by Harold Perrineau, who’s now known for appearing on the prime time hit Lost), a wheelchair-bound prisoner who’s doing time for killing a cop. He acts like the Greek chorus of a play by serving as our guide to all the ins-and-outs of prison life and prison slang; only Hill has the power (or jizz) to show us what’s really going on behind bars. Oz also features a Shakespearean-type character in the form of prisoner Ryan O’Reily, a member of an Irish gang who manipulates everyone around him to the point where he’s responsible for every single death that happens in season one. And the deceitful guy doesn’t even get his hands dirty, as some other fool ends up offing O’Reily’s targets. As actor Dean Winters notes in a featurette included on the show’s season one DVD, O’Reily is certainly Shakespeare’s Iago of Othello.
