Over the weekend, I rented and watched the entire second season of “Oz,” not having had any previous exposure to the show (though I am a big “Homicide” fan from days long past).
Dude. This show kicks so much ass.
The greatest thing about it (of what I’ve seen, anyway) is that almost every character is fascinating and loveable in their own way. Beecher? LOVE him. And yet…Schillinger? Love him too. How can this be? Adebisi disgusted me at first, but by the time he started hallucinating around ep 2.7 I was laughing out loud at everything he said. This show is seriously messing with my sense of morality.
Oh, and O’Reily, Alvarez, and Keller? Holy flurking schnitt, the hotness!
Does anyone know when the third (and fourth, fifth, and sixth) seasons will be released on DVD?
I too just started watching it. My brother taped the first three season and loaned them to me, so for a couple of weeks I became obsessed with the show. I second your emotion.
By the end of Season 3, my favorite character was Ryan O’Reily. Hot, yes. Sociopath, yes. Madly in love, yes. He reminds me of Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer-- he’s evil, he has a few redeeming qualities, and he’s a total fool for love. Dean Winters… ummmmmm.
I’m also very interested in the development of Tobias Beecher as a character. Damn is he complicated. I really wonder how the love affair between him and Keller progresses, if it ever even does. So much pathos, such a sad descent into nightmare. I hope it all works out for him in the end.
Adebisi is probably the most morally bankrupt character on the show-- he seems to have absolutely not one iota of goodness in him. He is… evil. Even Schillinger, the UberScumbag, at least loves his messed up kids. Sadly, he cannot see that it was he who messed them up.
Question: Was Dr. Nathan married when she was dating McManus? She was called Dr. Nathan then, and we know her husband’s name was Preston Nathan, so was she cheating on her husband or what? Glynn seemed pretty disgusted with McManus’ liaisons, which included her, so maybe.
As for when the show comes out on DVD, I think S2 just came out, so the wait could be a while. However, Season 3 started airing last Friday, and Season 4 will begin being broadcast on HBO East starting 12/19 at 10:15pm. It seems they will be showing 2 in a row every Friday, I hope through the end of the series.
You should really watch Season 1. They go through Beecher getting there and the crappy things that Schilinger(sp?) does to him to get him where he was.
Isn’t it a great series? I can’t wait for them to release Season 3.
I would suggest that anyone who is getting into OZ STOP AFTER SEASON 3.
The first two seasons are great. The third season is fantastic, reaching a conclusion of almost unbearable suspense.
But in season four, the shark tank had been jumped…in fact, the sharks were freely swimming in the halls of Oswald Prison and feeding at will.
This show had always been more allegorical than realistic, but by season four things have because so outlandish that it is impossible to suspend disbelief. The new characters are less and less interesting and more and more annoying. The plot lines become simply a matter of introducing a long string of forgettable characters and killing them in progresively more gruesome ways.
There are a handful of good moments in the last two and two-thirds seasons, but only a handful. The show was always basically a soap opera in Hell, and you just can’t maintain that for long without descending into a freakshow of self-parody.
I know you’ll want to go ahead and watch the whole series, and I hope you enjoy it more than I did. But my advise is still to watch through the third season, and make up your own version of how it ends. I promise it will be superior to the real thing.
As it got increasingly silly, I just amused myself by waiting for a character to express some hope or positivity about the future, knowing that character would soon be shanked or strangled or dropped down an elevator shaft or burned alive or whatnot.
It’s worse than showing your buddies a picture of your kid when you’re in a WW2 movie.
I wholeheartedly agree with the assessments of Silvio and Bryan Eckers re: OZs’ descent into inanity, ESPECIALLY in its last season. I was particularly dumbfounded by the casual throwaway death of Muslim leader Kareem Said. (Shot to death with a smuggled gun in the waiting room by a man he’d met once 30 years earlier? WTF??) The series finale rivals Dallas’ for sheer pointlessness.
Sweet mother of God, Askia, do you mind not ruining the series for the fans who haven’t seen all the episodes yet? I was planning on catching the OZ reruns on Canadian tv, but now you just took away part of the suspense.
I wathced most of the last season, and I agree that it pretty much degenerates into a ridiculous Dallas-like plot (except for the plot line involving Beecher, which is quite good).
Seasons 1 and 2 are great-- saw them on DVD. I’m looking forward to the release of season 3 on DVD.
I got a real kick out of seeing “Carmela” as a prison guard.
Oops! Oh, well. What’s done is done, so lemme spoil it some more. It happens in the last few minutes of episode 51, comes out of left field and basically has no plausibility or real repercussions. Trust me on this: while I admit to spilling the beans on Said, and being somewhat cavalier about it, the writers and producer Tom Fontana beat me to ruining the series looOOoong before that episode happens. Said’s death was one more bad move in a sea of desperate storylines that had contributed NOT ONE IOTA towards a compelling change in Emerald City’s status quo, the subsequent introduce-hope-and-kill-off-the-character storylines, the horrible, horrible Beecher/Keller romance, and the botched and lopsided way they handled Cyril O’Reilley’s execution. His reprieve, then death a few episodes later, was utterly cheesy.
Speaking of shark jumping and getting silly, I’ve read some season 4 (and 5 and 6) episode recaps that make me think that if I’m rolling my eyes at the implausibility of Dr. Nathan continuing to work in Oz after her trauma in season 2, I’m going to be hurling things and invectives at the screen later on. Yeah, Ryan O’Reilly is hot as fuck, but the man’s charm can only account for so much. It seems (not having seen the episodes in question) like the writers just didn’t know how to make her behave like a real, rational, normal woman. But that won’t stop me from watching.
And neither will knowing Said’s fate ahead of time – he kinda bores me.
I cannot explain my love for this show. I have been watching since the first episode, and if you ask me why I started, I can’t come up with a reason. I just love it!
I was hoping that the two of them would get the house with the white picket fence out in the 'burbs and live happily ever after. I’m just a romantic fool at heart.
Yeah, well, I haven’t been watching too much OZ in the last few years, mainly for the reasons that everyone stated about its decline in quality, but I wanted to watch the final season as a sort of closure to a series that hooked me early on.
And it’s Lee Tergesen (Tobias Beecher) I’m a fan of. Can you believe he’s the same guy from Weird Science? The tv show, I mean.
