Ultimately it doesn't matter because Oz is gone now, and has been for several years. I'm not sure whether or not the word of Oz's cancellation came down while they were still shooting Season 6, but it really seemed as if Tom Fontana and company had more up their sleeves. There were plenty of threads left unexplored, and their presence suggested that the creators had enough material available for an additional season. Within the last couple episodes there were intriguing new characters introduced, and tales just beginning their development. The ultimate finale of Oz was (I believe necessarily) a bit dissatisfying. I found myself weeping for almost a half hour after seeing it.
Episode 6 was the perfect example of this process. The realization of deeply held empathy is our reward for subjecting ourselves to such tragedy. Sometimes the result is magical, causing us to feel a depth of compassion we were barely aware existed within ourselves.
Oz series review professional#
Good television strives to close the distance between the cold hard facts we hear in the news and the visceral effects of harrowing experiences, aptly portrayed by competent professional actors. It was amazing that we could be taken to such emotionally vulnerable states simply with the dramatic depiction of something we know has happened in the past.
and I found ourselves viewing an unthinkable story arc that inverted our feelings and hopes for those involved. As in life, sometimes they are satisfying, and sometimes not.Įven when I thought that I could track the logic of the scriptwriters, I occasionally found myself tricked, and sometimes devastatingly so. Part of the fun (as it were) of watching Oz lies in the anticipation of these conclusions. In fact one such episode is underscored by a big house production of Shakespeare's MacBeth that contains a fitting resolution to a conflict set up in the very first show of the series. At other times the demise of an inmate occurs in such a dramatically poetic way that it seems almost inevitable. One major player is eliminated in such a shockingly unexpected way that it seems anti-climactic. If we learn nothing else from this show, it is that fate is often arbitrary and capricious.
Sometimes the abrupt endings of these lives is randomly meaningless, just as in our external reality. The last eight episodes clearly illustrate that absolutely no one is untouchable. Oz's creators were never shy about eliminating its main characters, no matter how much we were led to feel for them. Season 6 brought us a heaping dollop of what we'd come to expect from watching the previous seasons. While it's true that life in 'Emerald City' (the 4th level unit in which most of Oz's action takes place) is an exaggerated depiction of what modern incarceration is like, it does present us with a general picture of some of the extreme difficulties that we face in our administration of 'justice'. This milieu represents the most fatalistic and complex microcosm of our society, and if you think it represents only a narrow portion of the United States- then I think you are sadly mistaken. If Oz doesn't make you reflect on the prison industry (one of the fastest growing sectors in our 'New World Order economy'), then you're not watching closely enough. Yet at the dark heart of this journey, there is some humanity to keep us engaged. Six seasons of machismo, menace, shifting alliances, violence, and betrayal should satiate even the most bloodthirsty of viewers. and I completed our viewing of the complete series of HBO prison drama Oz.