Price: $39.98 $17.49

Until a few months ago I had never even heard of Oz. My boyfriend brought home the complete first season one day so we popped it in the DVD player and I've been hooked ever since. I quickly bought seasons two, three, and I've just completed the fourth season. Seasons one through three were the absolute best television there is. Being an Oz fan I much enjoyed season four but in all honestly it lacked what the first three seasons had.

One thing I didn't like is that they had so many different stories going on at the same time it was like they would spent three or four minutes on something that could have had potential (especially the main characters)if they would have only detailed it out more and left all of the bull stories out. I'm talking about the Chinese refugees, the aging pill, and etc. Especially the aging pill - what was the point in that?!? And most of what was going on never had a conclusion, it just left you hanging. It almost seemed like they just pulled a bunch of random ideas down from space and threw them randomly into this season. I was very disappointed but I still think the show is the best there is.

Coming off the nearly unmitigated brilliance of its third season, season four of Oz sees the show facing the tall order of maintaining the high standards of writing and acting that had characterized much of its history, and more often than not it's a success. This season is certainly not without its problems, some of them more damaging than others, but the show's visceral and emotional intensity is still very much in evidence, and even a flawed season of Oz is better than just about anything else. Season four picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of season three, with racial animosity in Oswald State Penitentiary at an all-time high, the psychotic Adebisi in possession of a gun and waiting for an opportunity to maximize its destructive potential, Beecher and Keller continuing their tumultuous gay love affair while Nazi leader Schillinger nurses a grudge against both, and Officer Whittlesy suddenly nowhere to be found (a circumstance certainly owing nothing whatsoever to Edie Falco's newfound success on The Sopranos). Naturally, it's not long before a dramatic catastrophe shakes up the already precarious situation in Emerald City and brings about a new level of disorder accompanied by a wild surfeit of plotlines and a level of bloodletting that's excessive even by Oz's lofty standards.

All the killing actually becomes a problem for the show as this season progresses--the constant murders begin to feel increasingly gratuitous after a while, to say nothing of the rather odd fact that nobody seems to have much interest in solving them. Obviously a prison show is going to rely heavily on the violence factor, but I think the creators of Oz could've distributed the killings far more judiciously and plausibly--The Sopranos, The Shield, and The Wire all take place in violent environments, but they've still managed to maintain an element of shock and impact when a character gets killed off. On Oz, especially in this season, the deaths (with a few exceptions) and the resulting revolving-door effect on the cast contributed to a somewhat numbing quality that pervades much of the season. Granted, there is the compensating plus of a train-wreck effect, as I often found myself literally unable to look away from all the carnage, but a little more realism would've gone a long way.

In an equally frustrating development, Oz seemed to develop a severe case of ADD in its fourth season, seeing its already somewhat fragmentary plot development crushed under the weight of a huge and fluctuating cast and an emphasis on momentum over coherence. With double the series's usual complement of episodes, we see a small army of new characters come through Oswald-among them an IRA fugitive on the run since Bloody Sunday, a pack of Chinese refugees, a legion of black street thugs, and a whole bunch of other guys I can barely remember-and few of these new arrivals are around long enough to make much of an impression. The result is a nonstop barrage of plotlines centered on sex, violence, backstabbing, and double-dealing among the inmates and staff, with character development often feeling perfunctory. Drug-addled, unpredictable new arrival Omar White, played by Michael Wright, is perhaps the best example of the problems in focus that largely characterize Oz's fourth season. He comes in at the halfway point with the obvious intention of becoming a major character, but only gets about five minutes an episode in which to get integrated into the show's ever-expanding universe, which isn't easy when he's shanking someone or relapsing on drugs on a weekly basis. Sure, Omar is blatantly overplayed by Wright, but it's not his fault--with Omar's limited and extremely busy screen time, nuance isn't exactly an option.

That this season works as well as it does is a testament to the core of characters who've been at its center from the beginning, along with a few newcomers who do manage to contribute something to show's harrowing, explosive approach. Even as Oz heads toward its home stretch, Tom Fontana still manages to find new dimensions to explore for his main characters and unfamiliar situations in which to put them. Sure, the show continues to drag out the Keller-Beecher affair and Ryan O'Reilly's (possibly) unrequited love for Doctor Nathan to diminishing returns, but in other cases we see familiar faces among both the inmates and staff undergoing profound changes in response to a variety of catalytic events. The staff undergoes some major shakeups as Warden Glynn starts to question his priorities in response to a new career opportunity and Emerald City chief Tim McManus slides deeper into depression and instability, but as always it's events among the inmates that take center stage, and to its credit the show is far from out of ideas when it comes to some of the major players behind bars. Kareem Said, especially, continues to emerge as one of the most complex and well-developed TV characters in history, played in memorably intense fashion by Eamonn Walker and imbued by the writing with a level of nuance that would be extremely difficult to bring to a Muslim character in the wake of 9/11. Said finds himself facing down a host of challenges to his ecumenical, non-violent worldview, none more prominent than a mid-season shocker that puts him on a sharp emotional spiral. For his part, it can be a little disorienting seeing a sadistic bigot and rapist like Schillinger studying scripture and eagerly awaiting the birth of his grandchild, but it does actually square with the pro-family, God-country-and-race message he's always propagated. Perhaps the best turn of the season other that Walker's, though, is submitted by Harold Perrineau as Augustus Hill, the wheelchair-bound lifer who serves as the show's narrator and often as its voice of reason. Hill has always been something of a moral center for the show, at least on the inmate side, and season four sees his character fleshed out a lot more fully than ever before as details about his past emerge and collide with some major developments in his present to produce an increasingly complete character in his own right.

Amidst the sea of new faces (many of whom quickly meet their ends), a few characters do also manage to survive long enough and get sufficient attention to become standouts as well. Anthony Chisholm is great as Burr Redding, a crafty, perpetually snarling drug lord hardened by a combination of Vietnam and the city streets he grew up on. Redding may be a vicious stone killer, but he's still got a logical moral code, and he's philosophical and introspective enough that I couldn't help but like him. His shrewd leadership ends up galvanizing Emerald City's black gangster elements for an ongoing war against the Latino faction led by the stylish and calculating Enrique Morales and the mafiosi under Chucky Pancamo, with predictably dramatic consequences for Em City's residents. Presaging the great work he would later do on HBO's incredibly brilliant The Wire, Lance Reddick does a powerful and intense turn as John Basil (aka Desmond Mobay), an undercover cop who goes into Emerald City with the best of intentions but quickly finds himself in over his head. Similarly, future Wire cast member Reg E. Cathey, easily one of the coolest actors hardly anybody has heard of, has a huge impact on the show in a relatively long arc as the charismatic Martin Querns, who replaces Tim as Em City's unit administrator and brings with him a hidden agenda that only serves to heighten Oz's already incendiary racial tensions. Shockingly enough, Luke Perry manages to make a similar impact on the show's dynamics as Jeremiah Cloutier, a larcenous ex-televangelist who comes in and makes some dramatic changes to Oz's spiritual order, at least to the extent that one exists.

In another welcome development, the show does make use of this season's larger allotment of episdoes to expand its focus beyond Emerald City, better living up to its title as it examines much more of its central institution. Continuing and expanding on a saga starting in season two, season four spends a great deal of time following the fortunes of creepy child-killer Shirley Bellinger and her new neighbors on death row. Despite the natural feeling of impending doom, there's still a somewhat lighthearted, darkly humorous feeling to the proceedings on death row, although that starts to subside as its residents meet their inevitable fates, albeit not always in a predictable fashion. The isolated cop wing, too, gets a couple of additions from the regular cast as the tragic story of the perpetually angry ex-correctional officer Clayton Hughes takes a series of turns for the worse.

Overall, while season four doesn't mark the best Oz has to offer, that certainly doesn't mean it's in any way without value. It takes a lot of risks, not all of which pan out, but it does at least demonstrate an admirable commitment to avoiding creative stasis as it approaches the beginning of its end, which is more than can be said for a lot of shows. And as usual, whatever else can be said about Oz, there's no denying its singular ferocity and almost total uniqueness. Despite some reservations, this season (and show) still gets a thumbs-up.

Oz was and still is one of my favorite movies of what really shows what goes on in the prisons today.