HBO's new prison drama, "Oz," is a
raw look at life off the street.

BY JOYCE MILLMAN | if you watch "Homicide: Life on the Street," "NYPD Blue," "Law & Order" and other cop shows faithfully, it's inevitable that every other week or so, you will see a detective trying to scare an accessory into giving up a trigger man by invoking hair-raising scenarios of prison life, replete with colorful euphemisms for sodomy, rape and being another man's bitch. And then the show usually ends. Rarely do these dramas follow convicted felons into the dehumanizing warrens of the correctional system. "Oz," the new drama series from "Homicide" executive producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, breaks TV's prison taboo -- and just about every other one too, from full frontal male nudity to copious use of the F-word. HBO's first weekly drama series, "Oz" makes good use of cable; this is one show that could never, ever appear unedited on broadcast TV. Then again, without the explicit sex, language and violence, "Oz" wouldn't be any fun at all -- what you'd be left with is an unrelentingly depressing premise and a bunch of miserable lifers to whom nothing good is ever going to happen. If Fontana (who wrote all eight episodes of "Oz") intended to make a case for prison reform, he's created a powerful position paper. Even in the gleaming, modern, rehab-oriented Emerald City unit of Oswald Maximum Security Prison (aka "Oz"), where prisoners are housed in cells with glass walls instead of those icky iron bars, life is still cheap, the weak are still victimized and politicians and bureaucrats on the outside pursue personal agendas that only escalate tensions on the inside. In the debut episode of "Oz," a near-riot ensues when the warden announces that, by order of the state environmental protection agency, the prison is now a smoke-free zone. But "Oz" isn't a position paper; it's a TV show, and as such it's pretty hard stuff. Oh, I'm not one of those prissy critics -- I can take the scene where the neo-Nazi burns a swastika into the butt of his meek, middle-class lawyer cell mate bride. I can take the scene where the paisan beats a guy unconscious for making advances in the showers. I can take the flashback scene where a cop drops a naked, handcuffed cop-killer off the roof of an apartment building. I can take the scene where one prisoner kills another by dousing him with lighter fluid and setting him ablaze. What I found really scary, though, were the artsy guerrilla theater touches, like the dreadlocked Last Poets-wannabe prisoner in a wheelchair (Harold Perrineau Jr., from the DiCaprio/Danes "Romeo and Juliet") who serves as the show's annoyingly intrusive on-camera narrator. Perrineau declaims stuff like, "They call this the penal system but it's the penis system -- it's all about how big, how long, how hard," usually as his wheelchair is rotating in mid-air. Why is he defying gravity? Because his mind is free 'though his body be bound in a prison within a prison. Ding! Pretentious Theatricality for $100, Alex! "Oz" does, however, have one of the most gifted ensemble casts ever assembled for a TV series, including Ernie Hudson as tough, pragmatic warden Leo Glynn (a role much like Yaphet Kotto's on "Homicide"), Terry Kinney as idealistic Emerald City head Tim McManus, a poignantly washed-out-looking Tony Musante as imprisoned mob boss Nino Schibetta, Edie Falco as lone female guard Anne Whittlesey, Leon as black inmate leader Jefferson Keane and Eamonn Walker as Black Muslim inmate Kareem Said. ("Homicide" fans will recognize many faces on "Oz," and will get a chuckle out of seeing Zeljko Ivanek, who plays the district attorney on "Homicide," promoted to governor.) Fontana's meditations on life and death are, as usual, both tough and fluid. And the show has a tantalizing lineup of directors, including Darnell Martin ("I Like It Like That") and Jean de Segonzac ("Homicide"). The problem is, there are only so many prison plots and character types, and "Oz" has them all, from the "Dead Man Walking" nun (Rita Moreno as psychiatrist Sister Pete) to the Linda Blair innocent behind bars (Lee Tergeson as the aforementioned hapless family man who becomes the property of his sadistic cell mate). Oh, and there's a riot a-brewin'. Fontana and his collaborators try to distinguish "Oz" through stylishly gritty and poetic camera work and late-night cable rawness, but it's still prison movie schtick and most viewers have probably seen it all before. Emotionally and dramatically, "Oz" doesn't move much beyond an "NYPD Blue" interrogation room taunt like, "When you get to the joint, let me know how it feels to have a subway train shoved up your ass." Except, here, you see the train. July 11, 1997 "Oz" premieres 11:30 p.m., Saturday, July 12 on HBO; it repeats at 10 p.m., Monday, July 14. Episode Two airs in the show's regular time slot, 11 p.m., Monday, July 14.