Forget ‘The Wire,’ HBO’s Ambitious Crime Thriller Is Still One of Its Best 29 Years Later

Oz served as a launching pad for many fan-favorite actors in some hard-to-watch roles.** J.K. Simmons **infamously portrayed Vernon Schillinger, the leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, who torments and assaults Tobias. Law & Order: SVU’s own Christopher Meloni stars as Tobias’ sociopathic lover, Chris Keller, who was partially responsible for Tobias’ downward spiral. Oz was almost an experiment itself, testing if premium television could work. Not only was it successful, but it also started a new era of television that is worth revisiting.

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

A precursor to the gritty depth of The Wire, Oz deserves more attention than it gets. Before David Simon’s acclaimed crime drama exposed the failures of Baltimore’s institutions, the six-season drama was already examining how power, corruption, and systemic failures shaped life behind bars. **It was the start of HBO’s premium brand **and went further than any other series was willing to go. Taking advantage of the freedoms of premium cable, the series could show the brutality of this world without holding back. As surprising and even horrifying as it could be at times, that was always what made Oz such great television.

Oz is not held back by any moral high ground. The series shows the harsh reality of prison and how confinement without any concern for rehabilitation affects the psyche. Oz doesn’t judge its characters, but shows them who they are. Supported by a large ensemble cast, acclaimed actors broke out in this series. Before Lost, Harold Perrineau and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje both played compelling characters in the series.

While Akinnuoye-Agbaje portrays a remorseless killer, Perrineau plays the narrator of the series in the role of Augustus Hill. The wheelchair-using character is a rarity who is not outwardly malicious and offers a neutral stance to the horrors of the prison. Hill’s narration often breaks the fourth wall, and his scenes are closer to poetry than to outright dialogue. To say that Oz was different from anything else on television is an understatement.

It demanded the attention of audiences and didn’t let go for six seasons. Viewers watched the character trajectory of Tobias, who becomes battle-hardened through his time in incarceration. As dark as it is, that is what makes it such a fascinating watch and why fans continue to return to the harrowing world.

1997 - 2003-00-00

Ernie Hudson