OZ: The Complete Second Season

Review By: Aaron Cutler
AaronCutler@TheCinemaSource.com

The second season of Oz, HBO’s mid-‘90s prison drama which paved the way for future programs by fusing violence, profanity and nudity with a multiethnic, multitalented cast to assay rich plotlines, picks up in the aftermath of the prison riot that served as the previous season’s finale. Its characters will shift and evolve over its several hours, many of them going from bad to worse. The season’s eight episodes, now available on DVD, are worth investigating; on top of their more salacious aspects, they also provide some of the most intelligently constructed and executed bits of television seen in the decade.

As we open the season, Emerald City, the experimental division of Maryland’s Oswald State Penitentiary run by Tim McManus (Terry Kinney) and Warden Glynn (Ernie Hudson), has been shut down after the costly attacks that left eight dead. Governor Devlin (Zeljko Ivanek) orders an investigation, sending Professor Alvah Case (guest star Charles S. Dutton) into the breach. The more questions that Case asks, though, the more troubling answers he receives, and Dutton’s powerhouse turn guides us from curiosity to indignation at a corrupt prison system. The character also serves as a stabilizing bedrock, as his interviews with each prisoner help to reacquaint us with this particular penitentiary’s yellow brick road.

In time, Em City reopens and business inside the prison proceeds as usual. Aryan chieftain Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) resumes his feud with former lawyer Beecher (Lee Tergesen). Thuggish O’Reily (Dean Winters) learns that he has breast cancer. Impressionable Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) falls in with the wrong group of Latino gangsters. Sociopath Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) falls for a Death Row inmate. And Muslim leader Said (Eamonn Walker) grows disillusioned with the ways of his flock. Throughout it all, wheelchair-bound Hill (Harold Perrineau) provides to-the-camera commentary on everything from natural selection to the value of family, all delivered as a prisoner’s blues.

These are merely a few of the plotlines extrapolated over the course of the episodes; the show lists no fewer than fourteen regulars, each with his or her own two to three storylines, and to call the densely plotted overall narrative Dickensian would still fail to do it justice. The different plot strands are so tightly woven and bound up so well together that, even with so many events and characters, we are always kept aware of what is happening and when. This should come as no surprise, however, seeing as executive producer/head writer Tom Fontana was previously responsible for one of network television’s most complex and edgy programs - Homicide: Life on the Street.

The previous season focused on the mutual antagonism between Beecher and Schillinger and, while this strand continues (Beecher delivers a particularly disturbing punishment to an Aryan in the first episode), the focus shifts more towards Said and Adebisi, who seem the closest to pure representations of good and evil that Oz has to offer. Watching Akinnuoye-Agbaje take steps toward humanizing his ...