OZ is probably my all-time favorite show, ever. Stick with it. There’s some shit episodes but they’re far outweighed by the good ones, and IMHO it stayed fantastic all the way to the final episodes. Usually what you’ll have is like one subplot that doesn’t go anywhere or one bad actor, which is a definite improvement over 90% of other television, which is filled with bad actors in bad subplots.
My main problem with OZ is credibility. Just what is the typical body count for a prison? And how many (dozen) have to be killed before McManus will say “Hey, Em City really isn’t working is it?”
It helps if you don’t think of OZ as being a documentary, but rather as depicting everything that could ever happen, ever, at a maximum security prison. If the show was perfectly realistic, it’d be pretty boring – prisoners eating breakfast, prisoners reading in the library, prisoners sitting in their cells, prisoners playing cards. And a big part of the show was its depiction of the attitude of the guards and staff toward the prisoners, the nonchalant, uncaring, even exploitative way they treated them.
For that matter, the same is true for many, many shows on television. How many married couples have as many wacky hijinks as the ones on sitcoms? How many cops deal with bizarre sex crime cases every single day as the ones on cop shows do? I could go on and on. No one expects those shows to be perfectly realistic, but for some reason OZ is supposed to be?