![]() Profoundly disturbing, it's a show that you don't want to miss, yet don't always want to watch, which makes the box set the ideal way to experience this sledgehammer depiction of life behind bars. Beecher represents everyman, in over his head in a world where his fellow inmates rank lawyers just below paedophiles. At its heart is the war between Beecher, a white lawyer who killed a girl while driving drunk, and Nazi leader Schillinger - a man so chillingly evil that he arranges the death of his own son. ![]() These are not just your run-of-the-mill shankings - there's also smothering, torching, hanging, bludgeoning, crushing (by elevator), poisoning with ground-up glass and suicide by cannibalism as one inventive inmate eats himself alive.Ī recurring theme is the struggle for power - over privileges, over drugs, over souls Aryan vs Muslim, Italian vs Hispanic, idealistic bureaucrat vs corrupt guard. Over the six seasons, more than 50 cast members leave Oz in a body bag. The violence, rarely telegraphed, is shocking and explosive. "There's something in the air," says Edie Falco, playing a guard in episode one, "and it ain't love." ![]() Less about rehabilitation than retribution, it's probably the bleakest series ever produced, set in a dehumanising world where every good deed is punished and all hope is cruelly, if imaginatively, extinguished. Without it, critically lauded shows such as The Wire wouldn't be the shows they are, David Simon has claimed. Don't look for Dorothy, Toto, and the rest of the gang here: Oz is an unrelentingly grim drama about life - and more often death - in an experimental American prison known as Emerald City.Ĭreated by Homicide's Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, it premiered in 1997 and was HBO's first one-hour drama. ![]()
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