Maybe you think something like 90210 should claim this lofty title, what with all its beautiful californian people going about their awesome lives, made so enviable from their vast mansions of perpetual summer, mansions that they only ever leave to go to even better places and meet fellow beautiful people to love and have crazy fun with at their private beaches, though their hearts so often and so completely break in what can only be described as the source of all misery in this world... If you did say 90210 you'd be making a fairly decent guess, and my own heart has belonged to Jessica Lowndes ever since I was a dumb fourteen year old kid catching random episodes of her show on TV. But some time afterwards I became a man, and so I sampled the first season of three very different shows – The Sopranos, The Wire, and Oz. And though the first two are the best shows ever made, in that order too, Oz is pretty cool too I guess, though it plays so fast and loose with its rules that it's barely a prison show... No, I'm now convinced that Oz, though very cool in some ways, is actually the best and most brutal high school TV show of all time.
On a more serious note though, this show really is all over the shop... It's sad because the first season is pretty damn good, and you don't get to be ranked one of the greatest TV shows of all time with absolutely nothing going right for you. Oz does have one or two aces up its sleeve, namely some very solid acting from quite a few of the main cast, some engaging storylines for the most part, a complex moral system whereby our appreciation of the characters ebbs and flows, and surrounding it all there's a whole lot of violence that only HBO knows how to provide. But then, after a few episodes of this, you get all too tired, and if you watch all fifty-six of them in rapid succession even more so...
In the pilot episode they establish that Oz is a real tough prison, though Emerald City is an experimental wing wherein prisoners enjoy some liberty and individuality because McManus, the city's founder, strongly believes in rehabilitation over punishment. But moreover, he believes in rehabilitation even for the worst of people, no matter how long their sentence or vicious their crime. That's a very noble idea, hell, for all I know it might even be the morally correct way to go about it, but then over the course of the show we find that, not only are the prisoners in Em City extremely hardcore criminals, but they are even hellbent on continuing their criminal enterprises, which they do with incredibly great ease. In fact, prisoners are sent there with a clear intent of engaging in a life of crime, something McManus would have seen as a lost cause after ten minutes of this little experiment. And that's the first pitfall of the show – they ended up writing a prison show where being in prison doesn't really matter.
Furthermore, in rewatching Oz I was constantly reminded of a scene from The Wire, a scene in which a social worker is trying to study kids affiliated with the drug trade in order to rehabilitate them. The age bracket he identifies as the target demographic is between eighteen and twenty-one, but he quickly finds out that at that age kids are already too seasoned for any reeducation to take hold. Well, if that's anything to go by, which it could well be since The Wire is an incredibly intelligent show, then McManus is constantly barking at the wrong trees and is apparently too stupid to notice or too evil to care. In the very first episode he immediately chooses to take in Beecher, which is a smart move since he could easily rehabilitate a man like him, but somehow he doesn't seem to realize what a brilliant idea it is to place him around guys who've been killers their entire lives... Not to mention how the increased freedom of Emerald City only allows them more and more violence, even within such a small, open space, full of apparently blind officers. Hence the high school comparisons, it's quite like how in those shows the parents and teachers are always written out, either momentarily or perpetually, whenever convenient for the story. We see prisoners becoming roommates, we see them constantly gossiping with one another in the main hall, then some more gossip in the cafeteria, they have food fights, talent shows, hell, they even end up doing Macbeth, though the sweet teacher doesn't seem to mind that she has to find a replacement after her original actor gets killed and his eye gouged out... After a few episodes in a row Oz really does start seeming like a thought experiment more than a prison show per say. Now, I'm not necessarily defending the necessity of absolute realism in fiction, that would have been too boring perhaps, but it's also kinda dumb that this entire show ends up being a drama just like any other but with many different groups of criminals huddled together. It's Game of Thrones but with all seven kingdoms inside one prison.
And the prison itself is funny too. First of all it exists somewhere in the United States of America but in an unspecified state. That's a neat idea and it allows for some interesting ambiguity, but too much ambiguity becomes akin to cheating. Then it's constantly drilled into our heads how rough of a prison it is, everyone goes on and on about it being maximum security, all dark and damp, we see prisoners constantly sighing about how bleak that place is, but in truth they spend their days watching TV, playing cards or chess, working in factories, the hospital, the mail room or the library, going to therapy sessions and taking classes, though we ironically see very little of that last one. We saw it a bit with Kenny since he was only sixteen but we don't see it for most of the other prisoners because I reckon the writers realized how boring and dumb it'd be to have stone cold killers sitting in a little classroom, or how stupid it'd be to have McManus hound them for not doing their homework... Still, for all their talk of rehabilitation they sure bailed on it in favor of the flashy brutality, and while that proved to be a smart business decision, it in essence constituted suicide because, for the sake of drama and violence, the show killed its own message. The best and funniest example of that is how McManus insists on having extremely violent guys like Adebisi on Em City but has absolutely no patience for Cyril, a violent man yes, but with the mind of a child. Again, it's just baffling how McManus is such an idiot that it's not even funny, he's an exceptionally clueless teacher, only instead of ignoring bullying, he ignores all manner of violence. And speaking of Cyril, arguably one of the most interesting characters what with his haunting double personality, both through the puppet Jericho and his visions, we get his very moving and powerful execution scene only for it to be blissfully interrupted, only for it to happen again in a much, much lamer way. The death scenes though are probably the show's bread and butter, starting with Dino. Thing is, he was arguably the best damn character and only lasted one measly episode, whereas someone like Poet managed to stick around for the entire show...
It's just a constant mess of convenience, shock value and twists for the sake of twists, all with zero concern for continuity or plot holes. Beecher is a timid man way out of his depth at first, only to be constantly abused by Schillinger and revolt by going absolutely mad. But then he mellows out a bit, becomes friends with Kareem Said, even kinda becoming muslim apparently, only for that thread to be dropped as soon as it gets boring. After all that drama, which is no way near ending, Schillinger gets transferred into Unit B, but it's okay because it seems to consist of just a damp hallway where prisoners hang out and shoot pool. Oh, and that's another thing. Maybe it's a budget issue but for all the talk about Oz being the biggest, baddest prison in the state, it seems like it just consists of the weird hub that is Em City plus a bunch of small hallways with five or six cells on either side. And for all the talk of overcrowding, the convenient issue to bring up whenever a prisoner is denied a transfer that would save him from violence, it seems like the prison is no larger than, you guessed it, the average high school. Only the drama is taken up a notch or two, or fifty...
At a certain point the story gets so convoluted that it's not even funny. It's absolutely infested with coincidence to the point silliness, it feels like every other episode we get a new prisoner who just so happens to have a huge connection with an already established character, either because they knew each other in a past life, or because he assaulted an actual member of the staff, or what have you. It's like the world is so damn tiny that every single criminal ends up in Oz, even becoming roomies with his best friend, like Ross and Schillinger. Because as much as Hill, in his sometimes interesting but other times pretentious speeches, talks about Oz being oppressive, prisoners actually seem freer than ever. Not only do they dress how they like, hold court whenever they like, and do whatever else they wanna do, they also have a ton of freedom when running the drug trade and even when committing murders. Apparently all you gotta do is fashion a shank and pay off a correctional officer. The first one is easy because prisoners are left alone everywhere and instantly steal whatever materials they need, all of which are seemingly unaccounted for, and the second one is even easier because officers are in such desperate need of extra cash that they even leave visitors alone after a little bribe, not fellow prisoners mind you, but actual civilians! And that's yet another thing because prisoners still have too much power, not just to exert pressure over their associates on the outside, but also to have them instantly commit very complex, and very violent, crimes. For example, Kenny has his girlfriend and her lover killed with a single phone call, and best of all, Schillinger tells his dumb, drug-addicted son to kidnap Beecher's children, presumably from a wealthy neighborhood, to hold them for ransom for many days, even while actually coming to visit for further orders, then cuts the son's hand off, kills him and then returns the girl, all without getting caught... I mean, damn, if his son is such a professional why stop there? And why is Oz so full when the police are so incredibly inept?
Yeah, well... Whatever. I rant about all of this because it's sad, and a bit annoying, to see otherwise great shows turn into messy soap operas, the television equivalent of clickbait, to see writing constantly molded into simplicity and convenience just to add more drama. Sooner rather than later you get all too tired of it, it gets to a point where this handful of characters have endured more than enough drama to last a hundred lifetimes. And then you have the staff in this prison constantly wanting to quit, finding it all too difficult to go on but somehow persevering, with the reason for that being some kind of addiction to the job and inability to live a normal life, an addiction that perfectly mirrors the show's thirst for more and more violence, even to the point of absurdity... So after recently rewatching Oz in rapid succession to see if it still holds up I now have to conclude that the answer is a resounding not really... It still has quite a bit going for it, and one of its deaths actually inspired me to write a little detail in my book, but no, in all things this is yet another rediscovery of the past that ends in disappointment. Of that I also ought to write more about one of these days, but for now I'll stick with this, because after speeding through fifty-six episodes I figured I might as well. Then again, maybe such TV shows aren't made to be watched like that, maybe I should have given myself some time to forget all the dumb inconsistencies so that I instead could have taken it one episode at a time. Maybe that's yet another idea I ought to write about at some point, because Oz would work better if seen that way, when seen as fifty-six days in the lives of prisoners inside a very bizarre limbo. Maybe my theory about long-form storytelling really is correct...
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