Thanks Willy...hey I was just clicking around the
www.hbo.com site and saw this...interesting..
1/2/03
--------------------------------------------------
USA TODAY
"The inside story on HBO's 'Oz'. True to form, its final season won't be pretty, either." By Gary Levin
--------------------------------------------------
Most viewers who think of HBO think of The Sopranos, cable's top-rated series. But before Tony and Carmela came along, there was Oz, a brutal prison drama that premiered in 1997 and was the network's first continuing drama.
Though less popular, it has The Sopranos beat in the body-count department, having killed off 50 characters from its huge cast in its first six seasons. But there are more to come as the show begins its seventh and final batch of eight episodes Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. In them, a few departed inmates even return from beyond the grave as on-screen narrators.
Mention Oz to those who have seen it and many will squirm at its soap-operatic tales of scheming, divided loyalties and unfortunate consequences, namely shankings, rapes and beatings. (It has been dubbed Melrose Prison.) But writer/producer Tom Fontana (Homicide: Life on the Street) says he "didn't want to entertain people."
"That's never really been my goal in any of the shows I've ever done. If you're going to do a show about prison, you can't do a show that people will be comfortable watching. If I've made people uncomfortable, I've succeeded."
Take Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen). A lawyer convicted of killing a girl while driving drunk, he is sent to Oswald Correctional Facility, a high-tech experimental prison. There, he's raped, becomes a junkie, has his limbs broken and learns that his son has been kidnapped and murdered and his wife has committed suicide. And Sunday's opener sees another tragedy.
"It's not for the faint of heart," says Dean Winters, who has played Irish instigator Ryan O'Reily since the series began. "I've sat there with my mom when she watched it and seen her cry."
Fontana concedes that Oz's appeal is narrower than the frolicsome Sex and the City, which may have limited its ratings â nearly 4 million viewers for its Sunday premieres last season â and awards contention. Unlike its HBO peers, Oz has never won an Emmy.
"I'd like to think years from now that people will see past the surface shock of it and see hopefully the deeper truths we've been dealing with," Fontana says. "The struggle to survive on a day-to-day basis, whether you're in prison or facing Saddam. There is a faceless population in the U.S. that deserves more recognition and attention than it gets by most of us on the outside."
Winters adds: "It lets you know there's a part of society out there that you don't want any contact with, that you don't want to set foot in that building."
The actor credits Fontana with creating a family atmosphere despite its subject matter. Two other Winters brothers are involved in the show: Scott plays Cyril O'Reily, Ryan's brother who is now on death row, and Brad is a staff writer.
Joining the cast for the final season are Fontana's cousin Patti LuPone, who plays the new jail librarian, and, in a two-episode guest stint, Joel Grey as a murderer.
Oz's HBO run comes to an end in late February with a 110-minute finale: "There is cataclysm, and there is also redemption," says Fontana, who aimed to tie up some loose ends and start others to show that life in Oz continues, even if the series doesn't.
The show faced cancellation two years ago when Fontana lost his studio lease in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, leading him to write a cliffhanger finale in which the prison's cafeteria exploded.
He found new space in Bayonne, N.J., and wrote an episode in which the prison was rebuilt. But he says it's time to call it quits after this season. "I'm not sure I have (another) season in me," he says. "I decided it was time. It's one of those things where you don't want to stay too long at the dance."
Now he's turning his attention to new projects: a series called Baseball Wives, in development at HBO, and a courtroom drama developed with HBO for ABC that takes the jurors' point of view.
And for a possible feature film, Fontana is writing a script about a real-life Stanford University experiment in which college students volunteered to live in a prison.
"Instead of writing about Oz, where everybody is bad, this is about people who are good becoming bad," he says. "It's like the opposite story."
