Land of Oz

HBO goes to prison

by Jon Garelick

OZ, Created by Tom Fontana. Airs on HBO Mondays at 11 p.m.

"Groundbreaking" is the word that's been thrown at Oz, HBO's highly touted new fictional dramatic series about life in a maximum-security state prison. The show (created by the Homicide team of writer Tom Fontana and producer Barry Levinson) is almost smug about its daring -- up-to-the minute "issues," cable-network frankness (male frontal nudity and lots of swearing), and arty theatrics and production effects. But the scenarios and characterizations are so familiar that at times Oz seems as hoary as the oldest prison flick (The Last Mile?). Just when you're supposed to be caught up in the emotional suspense of an encounter between reform-minded prison official Tim McManus and some unrepentant thug, the scenes start to play like Lenny Bruce's prison-movie routine, "Father Flotski's Triumph" ("Yer not a bad boy, Dutch -- killing six children doesn't make anyone bad!"). Still, Oz often works successfully against its own worst instincts, and now, five shows into its run, it keeps getting better. If you find yourself howling at a bit of over-the-top tough-guy prison dialogue, or the implausibilities of a given situation, you may also find it hard to turn away.

The basic set-up is Emerald City, a special cell block in Oswald Maximum Security Prison -- "a prison within a prison that stresses rehabilitation over retribution." Em City -- with its sleekly designed common area, and cells enclosed by glass instead of bars -- is a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright condo for cons. Its population breaks down into clearly delineated factions and individual types: the "wise guys" and their Don, Schibetta (played with velour-warm-up-jacket authenticity by Tony Musante), the devout black Muslims led by Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), an Irish gangster (the weirdly charming Dean Winters), and various oddballs, including one inmate convicted of murdering and cannibalizing his parents, and an old-timer who beat the electric chair during the 1965 East Coast blackout (the show is not without humor).

Fontana (the auteur of the series, he's also worked on St. Elsewhere) has stated his taste for extreme situations, and he shoots the works on Oz. A white lawyer is serving time for killing a young girl in a drunk-driving accident. Bespectacled, middle class, naive, he's the one we identify with, get it? So it makes sense that he not only becomes the "punk" of an older inmate who regularly rapes and humiliates him, but that the older inmate is a neo-Nazi. In perhaps the artiest conceit, a wheelchair-bound dreadlocked inmate (Harold Perrineau) delivers narration from a rotating glass box of a cell. Fontana even has two Father Flotskis -- Father Ray Mukada (B.D. Wong) and Sister Peter Marie (Rita Moreno!).

What works about the show is the nearly uniform underplaying by the cast (well, okay, Rita Moreno doesn't get much opportunity for this). J.K. Simmons as the neo-Nazi Schillinger displays the smooth delivery of a talk-show host and the solicitous manner of an avuncular proctologist. Leon (he's appeared in both Cool Runnings and Waiting To Exhale) creates a low-simmering intensity as a death-row inmate who's converted to Islam. And Edie Falco is convincing as a stressed-out single mother working double shifts as a prison guard.

But it's best not to get too attached to any of Oz's characters. State executions, revenge murders, transfers (for guards and prisoners alike) -- anything can zap one of the show's central characters on less than an episode's notice. This trap-door policy is one way in which the show is different. And on cable, without commercial interruptions, Fontana's grim, stylized realities have a relentless, cumulative power that transcends shock value. His more bravura strokes can fall flat. In the show's fourth episode ("Capital P"), Fontana juxtaposed an execution with shots of a desperate love scene between Falco's character and McManus (Terry Kinney) and Perrineau's facts-about-the-death-penalty voice-over. The sequence was more technically impressive than emotionally moving.

Oz is better appreciated for its grace notes than its masterstrokes. There's the cool, defiant outthrust chin of an inmate as he faces a gang murder. There are the subtle shifts in character from week to week. And aside from Homicide's signature handheld jitteriness, there are passages of flowing camera work that encompass one short scene of dialogue after another in a single take. That continuity only adds to the creeping claustrophobia that's overtaking the show. After five episodes, no one -- not the prisoners, the guards, or even McManus -- is immune from corruption, self-delusion, drugs. On TV, unpredictable is as good as groundbreaking.