Even from a nearly three-decade distance, HBO's first one-hour drama, "Oz," feels unique. I've seen dozens of brilliant and groundbreaking HBO shows — OGs like "The Sopranos," "The Wire," or "Six Feet Under" — that kicked off after Tom Fontana's iconic prison drama, but "Oz" remains a singular piece of work that you can't shoehorn in with any other thematically similar cable drama. It's about vicious criminals, gangs, guards, and everything you normally see in a prison story, but it's in no way traditional. Fontana had no interest in making a conventional narrative or portraying stereotypical characters you've seen many times before. "Oz" was bold, confident, and experimental, and that already showed in its pilot.

As the creator recalled in an oral history published on Yahoo , Chris A

See Full Page