When you think of it like that, the cliche is true: Revenge is sweet.” Revenge may be the ultimate Hallmark card.
I must affect your life as deeply as you have mine. “It’s like saying, you affected my life to such an extent that I must reciprocate. “When you take revenge on somebody, you are actually paying them the highest compliment possible,” Hill states in a monologue after one inmate betrays another. Some of these musings relate directly to the storylines on the show. This theme is constant throughout the whole series. The scenes were very much so a nice touch and really helped give Oz that unique vibe that it had. He is often seen in his wheelchair roaming around Em City, but in between scenes, Hill also delivers monologues that read like entries of an inmate’s diary. As explained in the start of the series, Hill was tossed from a rooftop after shooting dead a police officer, leaving him incarcerated for life and paralyzed from the waist down.
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The NarrationsĮach episode of the series also featured excellent narrations from prisoner Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau). By killing off the main character in the very first episode, it was instantly established that anything could happen at anytime on Oz. By the closing moments of the pilot, however, Dino’s been burned to death in the hole, setting the tone for what was to come. For all intents and purposes, it seems Dino is being set up as the primary character of the show, as he’s given the bulk of the screen time. “Don’t smile, ever,” he informs Beecher when the locked-up lawyer asks him for advice. Unlike Beecher, Ortolani is a hardass who seems to have figured out prison survival. Getting Beecher acclimated with life in Oz is his sponsor, Italian mobster Dino Ortolani (Jon Seda). It quickly becomes clear that the only way to survive his time is to drastically harden up, and unfortunately for Beecher, he’s left to endure total torment before he makes it to that point. Through his point of view, we come to see the process of his booking along with the challenges of fitting in – especially for a meek, milquetoast attorney who’s never gotten into trouble in his life. An alcoholic lawyer on the outside, Beecher is sent to Oz after accidentally killing a young girl on her bike while drunk driving. In the very first episode of the show, viewers get to see what it’s like to enter Oz when Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen) is incarcerated. Inmates in “Em City” are also carefully selected to allow for a certain balance between every social group with the goal of easing racial tensions between prisoners. Under the watch of Warden Leo Glynn ( Ernie Hudson), McManus aims to provide better rehabilitation for the prisoners by allowing them certain freedoms and teaching responsibility. A majority of the story is set in an experimental unit in the prison referred to as Emerald City, run by unit manager Tim McManus (Terry Kinney). The “Oz” title comes from the name of the fictional prison in which the series is set, the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary.