We already knew from the Judy Garland movie that strange things happen in Oz.
But the HBO series that borrows its title, with biting irony, from the name for Dorothy’s dreamland goes beyond bizarre and into the darkest human behaviors the show’s writers can order up.
This “Oz” is the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary, a fictional prison where all the bad things you’ve ever heard about doing time exist: gang thuggery, guard corruption, language from the place gutters empty into, food so bad it kills, and, yes, forcible interpersonal acts that would be illegal in Georgia even if voluntary.
This is a place that would have Dorothy clicking her heels faster than Michael Flatley. It might menace into rectitude the frightening, crooked inmates in “Scared Straight.” It certainly puts its viewers in a mood to return overdue library books.
Unlike the case of a broadcast-network or basic-cable series, where most barbaric acts could only be led up to and talked about afterward, “Oz,” by virtue of appearing on the pay-cable leader HBO (9 p.m. Mondays), can show you the parts between, for better and worse.
This freedom, in the hands of the veteran TV envelope pusher Tom Fontana (“Homicide: Life on the Street,” “St. Elsewhere”), adds up to what is surely the least relenting dramatic television series ever. Blood spatters onto the killer’s face in closeup in a scene where the camera takes the perspective of the victim. Characters, even many of the ones on the upright side of the law, flatly refuse to let you like or identify with them. And scenes that might have been inspired by the notorious Richard Speck videotape are de rigueur; indeed, this is one of the first entertainments to show men’s prisons being nearly as sexual in nature as the women’s lockups whose stories the cinema has so painstakingly chronicled.
Fontana, writing many of the episodes himself and executive producing them with film director and “Homicide” producer Barry Levinson, is clearly not in Baltimore anymore. But whether he is anyplace of merit with this series, whose second episode of its eight-episode second season is presented Monday, quickly comes to occupy the viewer’s mind.
Faced with so much brutality, with the seemingly endless cycle of escalating tension and violent eruption, with the racial epithets and dog-eat-puppy behavior, why not just change the channel?
The answer comes only in following the series over time. One episode will likely repel; put several together and “Oz” doesn’t exactly win you over so much as suck you in. You’ve turned the rock over and found yourself entranced by the shadow world beneath.
Not only is it holding our undercontemplated (but overpopulated) penal system in our faces, the series starts to coalesce as a journey toward darkness’ heart, a flashlight on some of the less glistening facets of humanity.
You don’t find empathy with the leader of the prison’s white supremacist group (J.K. Simmons), for example, but you do start to see him as more than a caricature. He is an eminently chilling man, in the writing and in Simmons’ taut performance, but he is a man nonetheless. Then, just as he starts to seem mellow and almost normal, he strings up a fellow con, a racial characterization carved in the victim’s belly.
More familiar is the character of the warden (Ernie Hudson), but Hudson, as is typical of this cast, gives him shadings that make him more than just another tough-but-fair functionary. In his dimly lit office, as the prisoners come before him seeking favors, he is almost like the Godfather.
Monday’s episode takes place 10 months after the harrowing riot that concluded last season and whose aftermath occupied the season premiere. The optimistic prison official Tim McManus (Terry Kinney, from Steppenwolf) is restarting the experimental Emerald City sub-unit where the riot broke out. He is preaching education, continuing in his quest to reach the unreachable.
Around this, a handful of other stories, some new, some continuing, occur. The Italians, owed a favor by the warden, take over the dining operation–and plot savage revenge for the murder of one of their number (by putting ground glass in his food). The warden faces a devastating family crisis–and punches an inmate. One prisoner, pressed into taking classes by McManus, too-predictably cannot read–and punches his teacher.
“Oz” is by no means as tightly constructed or as polished as “Homicide,” which eschews actual violence in order to illuminate, with brilliance and precision, the psychology of murder and societal retribution. Rough edges can be interesting, of course, but some of those in “Oz” feel unattended-to rather than deliberately unfinished.
Still, the chaotic, swirling events and the palpable tension Fontana and his guest directors create keep pulling you forward, toward another confirmation of the grim capacities of humankind. There’s no race like Homo sapiens.
