The must-see TV you missed
OZ SKY ATLANTIC
WHAT were the best shows of the last 20 years?
A quick rummage through the back of your brain will throw up some of the usual suspects: The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Deadwood, the astonishing reboot of Battlestar Galactica, Mrs Brown’s Boys.
The list is seemingly endless and seems to grow longer with each new season, as new shows come along at dizzying speed – actors and creative types now realise that TV is the new movies and everyone wants a piece of the pie.
But none of those shows – with the possible exception of Mrs Brown’s
Boys, I suppose – could have existed without Oz, the groundbreaking HBO prison drama which is now being shown on Friday nights on Sky Atlantic.
Oz was the first shot across the bows of standard TV entertainment all the way back in 1997 when HBO decided to take a risk and invest in a one-hour, full frontal – in every way – adult drama.
Freed from the narrow restrictions placed on standard network TV and its need to placate advertisers, HBO was subscription only, which meant normal rules didn’t apply and, boy, did they throw everything at this experiment.
The ‘Oz’ in question is Oswald Penitentiary and the show revolves around the staff and inmates in Emerald City, an experimental unit run by the idealistic Tim McManus.
Unfortunately, his lofty ideals also means that Em City is home to the worst of the worst – the Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, Irish and Muslim inmates, cannibals and sex offenders all simmering side by side.
But even now, nearly 20 years since its first episode, it retains the power to truly shock – both with the graphic and frequently sexual nature of the violence and the pure poetry of the dialogue written by Tom Fontana, the granddaddy of the new phenomenon known as the show runner.
There’s an old joke that only about 1,000 people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but they all went on to form their own band.
There’s a touch of that with Oz, because it made an such indelible mark on how TV was made and what could be done with the medium. In fact, even the incidental music is brilliant.
There was always more to Oz than the visceral and flinch-inducing violence. No, the success lay in the brilliance of the characters.
Ryan O’Reilly, the IrishAmerican brains of the operation, played by the great Dean Winters, is the best psychotic charmer you could ever feel guilty for rooting for.
Kareem Said, the Muslim leader, is a compelling figure, while the presence of Tobias Beecher, a lawyer who killed a child in a drink driving accident is, for all intents and purposes, the audience representative in the jail – a man terrified by what he sees around him.
Whenever someone asks what my favourite show of all time is, Oz is always the answer.
Tune in tonight and see why. It’s also available on Catch Up.