| Oz | |
|---|---|
| Genre | |
| Created by | Tom Fontana |
| Written by | Tom Fontana Bradford Winters Sunil Nayar Sean Jablonski Sean Whitesell |
| Directed by | Adam Bernstein and others |
| Starring | Kirk Acevedo Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje Ernie Hudson Terry Kinney Rita Moreno Harold Perrineau J.K. Simmons Lee Tergesen Eamonn Walker Dean Winters |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of seasons | 6 |
| No. of episodes | 56 (List of episodes) |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Tom Fontana Barry Levinson Jim Finnerty |
| Producer(s) | Debbie Sarjeant Mark A. Baker Irene Burns Bridget Potter Jorge Zamacona Greer Yeaton |
| Editor(s) | Deborah Moran |
| Running time | 55 minutes |
| Production company(s) | The Levinson/Fontana Company Rysher Entertainment HBO Original Programming |
| Broadcast | |
| Original channel | HBO |
| Original run | July 12, 1997 – February 23, 2003 |
Oz is an American television drama series created by Tom Fontana, who also wrote or co-wrote all of the series' 56 episodes[1] (and received the actual OZ tattoo that was filmed for the credits).[2] It was the first one-hour dramatic television series to be produced by premium cable network HBO.[3] Oz premiered on July 12, 1997 and ran for six seasons. The series finale aired February 23, 2003.[1][2] The show was filmed in New York City, New York and later Bayonne, New Jersey.
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"Oz" is the nickname for the Oswald State Correctional Facility, formerly Oswald State Penitentiary, a fictional maximum-security prison (level 4). The nickname is a reference to the classic film Wizard of Oz, which is notable for popularizing the phrase: "There's no place like home". In contrast, the series has used the tagline: "It's no place like home".
Many of the plot arcs are set in "Emerald City" ("Em City"), also a concept from The Wizard of Oz. In this experimental unit of the prison, unit manager Tim McManus attempts to emphasize rehabilitation and learning responsibility during incarceration, as opposed to carrying out purely punitive measures. Emerald City is an extremely controlled environment in which there is a carefully managed number of members of each racial and social group, with the hope of easing tensions among these various groups.
Under McManus and Warden Leo Glynn, the inmates in Em City all struggle to fulfill their own needs. Some fight for power; either power over the drug trade or power over the other inmate factions. Others, corrections officers and inmates alike, simply want to survive long enough. In particular the prisoners want to make parole or even to see tomorrow. The show gives a no-holds-barred account of prison life with all the plots, subplots and conflicts given context and explanation by the show's wheelchair-using narrator, Augustus Hill.
Oz chronicles the attempts of McManus to keep control over the inmates of Em City. There are many groups of inmates during the run of the show and not everybody within each group makes it out alive. There are the African American Homeboys (Adebisi, Wangler, Redding, Poet, Keene, Supreme Allah) and Muslims (Said, Arif, Hamid Khan), the Wiseguys (Pancamo, Nappa, Schibetta), the Aryans (Schillinger, Robson, Mark Mack), the Latinos (Alvarez, Morales, Guerra, Hernandez), the Irish (the O'Reily brothers), the gays (Hanlon, Cramer), the bikers (Hoyt), and a number of others (Rebadow, Keller, Stanislofsky). In contrast to the dangerous criminals, character Tobias Beecher gives a look at a usually law-abiding man who made a fatal drunk-driving mistake. The episodes are narrated and held together by inmate Augustus Hill, who provides the show with some context, thematic analysis, and sense of humor.
The ensemble cast included Christopher Meloni, Ernie Hudson, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Harold Perrineau Jr., Eamonn Walker, Rita Moreno, John Lurie, Terry Kinney, Betty Buckley, Kathryn Erbe, Lee Tergesen, B. D. Wong, J. K. Simmons, Dean Winters, Scott William Winters, Kirk Acevedo, Erik King, Evan Seinfeld, David Zayas, Lauren Vélez, and Edie Falco.
Eric Roberts, Joyce Van Patten, Method Man, Luke Perry, Master P, Treach, LL Cool J, Rick Fox, Dana Ivey and Peter Criss have made appearances on the show.
Oz is primarily narrated by inmate Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau, Jr.), former drug dealer, convicted murderer, and former drug addict. Now paralyzed from the waist down and in a wheelchair, he appears in surreal segments and introductions that usually relate to an overall theme of the episode, as well as set up scenes, introduce characters, or add epilogues. When necessary — usually when a character is introduced — Hill appears as an omniscient narrator. Used as a literary device of the writers, he narrates the details of characters' crimes, their inmate identification numbers, and their sentences. Hill appears as a recurring character within the show's story lines until his death at the end of the fifth season; he and other deceased characters then share narration duties throughout the final sixth season.
Hill's narrations break the fourth wall, in that Hill addresses the camera (and thus the audience) directly, out of the fictional context of the scene. Hill also appears in scenes wherein he interacts with other characters in the story (in these he does not address the camera). Only once in the series did Hill appear to directly address another character with one of his narrations; in the Season 3 episode "Unnatural Disasters," the character Simon Adebisi turns on a computer and sees Hill, dressed as a pharaoh and speaking to him. Adebisi was troubled by this event, but wrote it off as a drug-induced hallucination.
Cast members are billed in alphabetical order.
Oz took advantage of the freedoms of premium cable to show material that would have been too excessive for traditional American broadcast television, including such elements as coarse language, drug use, violence, male frontal nudity, homosexuality, and male rape, as well as ethnic and religious conflicts.[3]
In Australia, Oz was screened uncensored on the free-to-air channel, SBS. This was also the case in Israel, where Oz was displayed on the free-to-air commercial Channel 2; in Italy, where it was aired on the free-to-air Italia 1; in the United Kingdom, where Channel 4 aired the show late at night; in Ireland, where the series aired on free-to-air channel TG4 at 11 p.m.; and in Brazil, where it was aired by the SBT Network Corporation, also late at night.
In the Netherlands, Oz aired on the commercial channel RTL 5. In Sweden and Norway, it aired on the commercial channels TV3 and ZTV late at night, and in Finland, on the free-to-air channel Nelonen (TV4). In Canada, Oz aired on the Showcase Channel at 10 p.m. EST. In Denmark, it appeared late at night on the non-commercial public service channel DR1. In Spain, the show aired on premium channel Canal+. In Estonia, as well as Croatia and Slovenia, the show was aired late at night on public, non-commercial, state-owned channels ETV, HRT and RTV SLO. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was aired on the federal TV station called FTV. In Portugal, Oz aired late at night on SIC Radical, one of the SIC channels in the cable network. In France, the show aired on commercial cable channel 'Serie Club,' also late at night. In Turkey, Oz was aired on Cine5; DiziMax also aired the re-runs. In Serbia, Oz aired on RTV BK Telecom. In Panama, Oz aired on RPCTV Channel 4 in a late-night hour. In Malaysia, full episodes of Oz aired late at night on ntv7, while the censored version aired during the day. In New Zealand Oz aired on The Box at 9.30pm on Wednesdays in the early 2000s (decade).
The program's relatively low number of episodes per season (eight each; sixteen in Season 4), is part of the trend in cable network programming, in which shows often feature shorter seasons than programs on American free-to-air channels, which typically feature sixteen to twenty-two episodes per season.
On April 21, 2009, Variety announced that starting May 31, DirecTV will broadcast all 56 episodes in their original form without commercials and in high definition on the 101 network available to all subscribers. The episodes will also be available through DirecTV's On Demand service.[5]
The series was co-produced by HBO and Rysher Entertainment, and the underlying U.S. rights lie with HBO, which has released the entire series on DVD in North America. The international rights were owned originally by Rysher, then Paramount Pictures/Television after that company acquired Rysher. CBS Paramount International Television currently owns the international TV rights, and Paramount Home Entertainment/CBS DVD owns the international DVD rights.
HBO Home Video has released all six seasons of Oz on DVD in Region 1 and Region 2. The releases contain numerous special features including commentaries, deleted scenes and featurettes.
| DVD Name | Ep # | Release Date |
|---|---|---|
| The Complete First Season | 8 | March 19, 2002 |
| The Complete Second Season | 8 | January 7, 2003 |
| The Complete Third Season | 8 | February 24, 2004 |
| The Complete Fourth Season | 16 | February 1, 2005 |
| The Complete Fifth Season | 8 | June 21, 2005 |
| The Complete Sixth Season | 8 | September 5, 2006 |
A soundtrack containing East Coast, West Coast and Southern hip hop was released on January 9, 2001 by Avatar Records. It peaked at #42 on the Billboard 200 and #8 on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.[6]
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