Oz Review

This is where the modern cable drama starts, and the influence is easy to trace, because everything that followed took the serialized structure, the ensemble depth and the willingness to kill anyone from here. Fontana's experimental unit is a stage set and the show uses it that way, with Harold Perrineau narrating from a rotating glass cube in a device that should not work and mostly does. The casting is startling in retrospect. J.K. Simmons plays the most frightening man in the building without ever raising his voice, Christopher Meloni is genuinely unpredictable, and Rita Moreno supplies a moral center the show otherwise lacks.

What holds it back is a plotting instinct inherited from network television, where alliances form and dissolve on a weekly cycle and characters are killed for shock more often than for consequence. The later seasons pile on so many deaths that the violence stops meaning anything at all. It looks cheap, all fluorescent tile. Ugly, hugely influential, and much rawer than the prestige era it made possible.