The entirety of Oz is available to stream at HBO Now.

Both the show’s content and style still shape prestige dramas today, and HBO programming is better for it. Confronting sex and other difficult themes, HBO began as a complex and nuanced voice with Oz. That kind of frank honesty was shocking to viewers in the early 90s, but contemporary television, particularly on HBO, now uses sexual assault as a rating tactic. Oz allowed sex to be complex, and it also framed rape as an unfortunate, but prevalent, factor in prisoners’ lives. Oz treated sexuality as an important, and imperfect part of the human experience, and not every sex scene was framed as a redemption, or a breach, or as an outright mistake for either character. Sexuality didn’t redeem anyone in Oz, and in fact, displays of genuine emotion were often illustrated as too dangerous. Oz’s gay characters, like its straight characters, were selfish, manipulative, frightened, or unpredictable. HBO hadn’t quite figured out how to handle a pantheon of characters linked only by motif, and Oz’s creator Tom Fontana tinkered with narrative tools that eventually inspired David Simon’s The Wire, one of the greatest television series of all time.įinally, Oz made forward strides in the depiction of gay men on television, not by flooding each frame with positive examples, but by exploring some of the more taboo aspects of sex. They weren’t slick yet, and their dream sequences and hallucinations didn’t have the glossy overtone that so many of Tony Soprano’s did, in later years. Though programs like The Sopranos and The Wire are often credited as more influential, watching Oz is like discovering the adolescent journals of HBO’s production team. Season 1 of this gritty HBO drama series introduces some of the diverse inmates who live within a pecking order of Gangbangers, Latinos, Muslims, Westies, Aryans, and Wiseguys. Theyre considered even luckier if they get out of Emerald City alive. Even in its final seasons, which included a bizarre musical episode, Oz shaped the ambitious television drama as we know it today. Inmates at Oz are considered lucky if they get into the prisons 'Emerald City' experimental unit. Sometimes Oz moved like a crime procedural, but often it soared like Shakespearean tragedy. What’s more, it was heavily stylized, beginning each episode with a prelude from wheelchair-bound prisoner Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), who waxed poetic on larger themes affecting the prisoners in Oswald State Penitentiary. The show was ruthlessly violent - criticizing the penal justice system, portraying both rape and homophobia, interrogating race relations and pitting Muslims against Christians.

When HBO produced Oz in 1997, American audiences had never seen anything like it on television.

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