Prison: Life on the Inside

There is no great and powerful wizard in HBO’s new series “Oz.” And no one will ever mistake it for Kansas.

“Oz,” from executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana (“Homicide: Life on the Street”) is a gritty, rough, pull-no-punches drama. The one-hour ensemble series, premiering Saturday, is set in a fictional urban prison named Emerald City, an experimental unit of the Oswald Maximum Security Prison. The prisoners are housed in modern, sterile facilities--straight out of an Anthony Burgess novel--complete with glass-enclosed cells. Though the emphasis is on rehabilitation, survival belongs only to the fittest.

“I like to think of this as my slow decline into madness, from ‘St. Elsewhere’ to ‘Homicide’ to ‘Oz,’ ” quips Fontana, who wrote all eight episodes of “Oz.”

“I was telling someone on the set today that I have never been to a psychiatrist and he said, ‘Really? That’s amazing.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. Look at the stuff I write. I get it all out.’ ”

“Oz” is not for the faint of heart. In the premiere episode, a new, naive prisoner receives a tattoo of a swastika on his backside from his cellmate, the head of the Aryan Brotherhood. A gay inmate is beaten senseless in the showers, an AIDS patient is suffocated by an inmate in his hospital bed and a drugged prisoner is burned to death in his cell.

Fontana doesn’t really know if “Oz” will appeal more to men than women. “I just know that an HBO audience is much more open to this kind of thing than a normal television audience,” he says. “They have spent their money. They want something different. Evidently, whenever they have aired either a prison documentary or a movie about a prison, the ratings always do very well.”

Terry Kinney (“thirtysomething,” “Sleepers”), who plays Tim McManus, the idealistic head of Em City, believes the series has a good chance of attracting a female audience. “Men looking at themselves in confinement--that might not be a place where they want to go. But women might look at this as some sort of understanding of the male animal. There is no better way to understand the male animal than to confine them together.”

Besides Kinney, the series features Ernie Hudson (“Ghostbusters”) as Leo Glynn, the by-the-books prison administrator; Harold Perrineau as Augustus Hill, a disabled prisoner who serves as guide and narrator; Tony Musante as the head of the Wiseguys and the lord of the drug trade; and Rita Moreno as Sister Peter Marie, a nun who serves as a psychological counselor and arranges conjugal visits.

Kinney loves the fact that his self-righteous, liberal character becomes more and more demented as the series progresses.

“I sort of buzz my hair off, grow a beard,” he says. “What’s really happening is that he is coming almost indistinguishable from the prison and ultimately is not leaving the place a lot. His skill as a communicator, which was never great, is diminished even more. He blames himself for each inmate he can’t reach, but what he can’t admit is that some people refuse to change or most prisoners refuse to change.”

Fontana says that he’s long wanted to do a series set in prison, because he “wanted to go to a place where ordinary people are reacting to extraordinary situations. That’s the basis of ‘St. Elsewhere’ and ‘Homicide.’ To me, that’s fascinating drama.”

He also feels compelled to write about the “unanswered questions” he has about life. “I write to figure out what the right answer is and invariably only complicate the question by what I write,” Fontana explains.

“That is why I love writing TV: You can leave the questions in the air for the audience to try and figure out. I would love nothing more than when the hour is up that a couple turn off the TV and get into a discussion about what’s right and what’s wrong, what is ethical and what’s moral and what’s not.”

Fontana says he opted to do “Oz” for cable not just because he wanted to push boundaries but also because he believed cable would allow him to tell the stories as honestly as he could.

“That’s the frustrating thing about doing commercial TV,” he says. “Your doctors can be flawed, but they really can’t be bad. Your homicide detectives can be flawed, but they really can’t be as tough as homicide detectives really are. This allowed me the opportunity, really, to explore these characters without censorship. I don’t just mean dirty words and naked bodies, but without having to censor my own creative point of view.”

Adds Fontana: “My attitude is, and this isn’t to insult anybody else, but I think there is a place for ‘Oz’ on TV just as there is a place for ‘Touched by an Angel.’ I am thrilled HBO is letting me get away with this. Can you imagine me saying to NBC, ‘And then a guy gets a swastika on his butt?’ ”

“Oz” also has a unique visual style. The series’ directors include such independent filmmakers as Nick Gomez (“Laws of Gravity”), Darnell Martin (“I Like It Like That”) and Alan Taylor (“Palookaville”), who all previously worked on “Homicide.”

“I think it’s important when you are going to take risks from a writing point of view to hire directors who take risks,” Fontana says.

Taylor says he has enjoyed his experiences on both “Oz” and “Homicide” because, “you get a chance to learn and then [you can] use it or not in your own work.”

Fontana, Taylor says, “is a good combination of hands-on and hands-off. I certainly never felt he was breathing down my neck. I think Tom is being as rough and as honest as he wants to be [in his writing], but at the same time what surprised me was how brave the series seems to be in some of the visuals and that they are sort of experimenting as they are going along.”

If everyone turns out happy with the experiment, HBO may order additional episodes of “Oz” for another season.

“Oz” premieres Saturday at 11:30 p.m. on HBO. Beginning July 14, the series will air Mondays at 11 p.m.