Quantcast
Channel: Elon Green – The Toast
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

The Legacy of Oz: A Chat with Tom Fontana (and a Special Guest)

0
0

I got obsessed with Oz a few a months ago, when I rewatched the entire show as I was unpacking the house. If you don’t know it—I pity you—Oz, produced by Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson, is the fictional depiction of a prison and its inmates. It got decent reviews, but many critics were put off by the violence. “I am starting to think that some of the violence is excessive,” wrote the Baltimore Sun's David Zurawik. “[A]re its sociological themes anything more than window dressing for lurid prison scenes?” asked Caryn James for the New York Times. "The show is as dehumanizing as the prison system it attacks," said USA Today's Dinitia Smith.

Seeing Oz 12 years after it went off the air, however, I was struck by two things. First, how unexaggerated it seems now -- it’s brutal and violent, sure, but no more so than an actual supermax. But also, how remarkable it was that one of the main characters is a strong, proud Muslim man, who is unapologetically faithful and is, for the most part, not mocked for it.

After a little prodding, Tom Fontana, who also wrote and produced Homicide: Life on the Streets, invited me to his Manhattan office to talk about Oz and its legacy.

ELON GREEN: I went back and watched the show again, and it was a strange experience. Some it really seemed like a documentary. Particularly the stuff with the Aryan Brotherhood. I just read David Grann’s New Yorker story on them, which was published years after the show began. Everything just seemed way ahead of its time.

TOM FONTANA: Well, I did a couple of years of research before I started really figuring out what the show was. I went to a lot of prisons—maximum security, medium security—and what I began to see was the populations, and how segregated they were. It really was, in a way, reporting. Because all I did was form the characters, not out of any individual that I met, but out of this sort of, oh, this the world, not only in small, but in extremis. It is the world that we live in, but literally all the walls are torn down. These people have to exist with each other, you know, or die in the trying.

Read more The Legacy of <em>Oz</em>: A Chat with Tom Fontana (and a Special Guest) at The Toast.


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 3

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images