I just want you to know that I know you’re a fraud. “I’m telling nobody that you’re a cop, a cop who breaks the law in the name of the law.
“I’m telling nobody nothing,” sneers Hill, sympathetic in his utter cockiness. “Busted,” after a fashion, by his erstwhile friend Hill, who discovers his identity, Mobay is furious and afraid. The episode is typically rife with aggression and cruelty, including abuses by the exquisitely pained Mobay, hooked on heroin and increasingly aware that he won’t be able to maintain his cop status. He starts Episode Five, “Gray Matter,” by wondering “Can we end violence now and forever?” Unlikely. The episodes were typically initiated by a bit of around Hill’s philosophical narration: seated in his wheelchair, he would hold forth on all sorts of subjects, from gambling to racism to women’s bodies to drug abuse to government corruptions. And yet they do suggest the sorts of bonds established on the set (as when Fontana recalls he had asked for a naked sex and frankly pretty rough scene from Kristin Rohde, and she showed some hesitation, he stripped completely, in an effort to convince her he “wouldn’t ask her to do anything wouldn’t do”). The exchanges are colorful and trusting, sometimes obnoxious and usually performative. This much is clear from the commentary tracks for the fourth season (2000-2001) set, one by Moreno (who calls herself “a nervy Puerto Rican if ever there was one”) and Fontana (“Every guy on this show wanted to take you in the dressing room and ravish you!”) on Episode Eight, “You Bet Your Life,” as well as Fontana and Tergeson and Dean Winters for number 16, “Famous Last Words (along with a 30-minute collection of deleted scenes, some grim, others less so). With characters and actors exploring all manner of startling, horrifying, and downright discomforting behaviors and attitudes, the series became provided unusual opportunities and community.
The saga of Oz (on air 1997-2003) is grueling and surprising, a series as well-known for its challenges to televisual conventions (even HBO’s conventions) as for the surpassing skills of its many contributors, from writer/creator Tom Fontana to characters and performers - prisoners Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), Beecher (Lee Tergesen), Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Said (Eamon Walker), Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo), Keller (Chris Meloni), Schillinger (JK Simmons), undercover officer Mobay (Lance Reddick), Ryan and brother Cyril (Dean and Scott William Winters), Poet (mums ) - and staff members McManus (Terry Kinney), Father Ray Mukada (BD Wong), Sister Peter Marie (Rita Moreno), Officer Claire Howell (Kristin Rohde), Warden Leo Glynn (Ernie Hudson), and Dr. The fourth season DVD set, the extra-long season of 16 episodes, brings you back into Emerald City, the experimental unit of the Oswald State Correctional Facility, where revenge and desperation are the overriding modes of every damn day. At once raw, precise, and seductive, the series’ score underlines recurring tensions throughout. Has any TV series soundtrack been so true to drums? Arresting for any number of reasons - graphic violence, extreme masculinity, harsh language - Oz also brilliantly inventive with its percussive soundtrack. Timmy (Sean Dugan), “Revenge is Sweet” (Episode 11) Ryan: It’s the end of the fuckin’ universe. Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), “A Cock and Balls Story” (Episode One) Tonight, the prison population has reached an all time high: two million.