Playing it safe

Wheezing Oz; arresting P.O.V.

by Robert David Sullivan

Eamonn Walker as Kareem Said in Oz

The plot twist has been a long time coming. HBO received so much praise for its original series in the '90s that a backlash became inevitable. For a television critic, it's now a no-brainer to say that the cable station is playing it safe by stringing out its successes (including The Sopranos, The Chris Rock Show, and Sex and the City) and holding back on anything new. But just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's not true.

The strongest piece of evidence that HBO is in a rut is the fourth-season opener of Oz, which airs on Wednesdays at 11 p.m. (Episodes are repeated on Thursdays at midnight and on Saturdays and Sundays in various late-night slots.) When the prison saga premiered, in 1997, it was a bracing antidote to idealistic cop shows like NYPD Blue. Its scheming characters and curving story lines made Oz the high point of the summer TV season. But now we can see people getting stabbed in the back on the desert-island game show Survivor, where almost every "castaway" has adopted an insincere smile and a knack for nursing grudges. These smarties would have seen through Oz's Ryan O'Reilly and kicked him off the show the first week. (I can't say the same for the stiffs on CBS's other experiment in voyeurism. The audience for Big Brother, which peeks at 10 strangers who have been imprisoned in a California house for no good reason, steadily declined during its first week of multiple episodes. It may take a gang rape, an earthquake, and an outbreak of bubonic plague to get our attention back.)

The first two episodes of Oz's new season (which started this week) dispense with a few long-time characters, but they're not necessarily the ones I'd have voted off the island, er, series. The fate of prison guard Diane Whittlesey (Edie Falco, who's now too busy with The Sopranos to continue here) is especially inane: we learn that she's never coming back from her London vacation because she's impulsively married a Buckingham Palace guard. Making some cast substitutions is a good idea, but the three new inmates on the season opener are nothing more than pawns for the existing characters. Did Oz producer Tom Fontana secure the return of cast members Dean Winters and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje by promising not to add any characters as smart as O'Reilly and Adebisi?

Almost every development in the first two episodes stands out as a naked plot device, including a short-lived program to let the solitary-confinement prisoners get a little fresh air and the continued efforts of Sister Pete (Rita Moreno) to get murderers in the same room with their victims' families. The ongoing battle between disillusioned lawyer Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen) and white-supremacist Vern Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) is getting tiresome, but I've learned not to get my hopes up, not even when Beecher says, in this week's episode, "There's always going to be trouble between me and him until one of us ends up in the morgue."

Of course, I'm still going to watch Oz for the rest of the summer. There's some terrific acting here (most notably Eamonn Walker as the tightly coiled Kareem Said), and the series has become more visually interesting even as the scripts have grown repetitive. Oz also has some of the best faces on television: the lighting emphasizes the actors' scars and age spots, in contrast to the People-magazine faces on even the "grittiest" network series. (Compare the Christopher Meloni of Oz with the Christopher Meloni of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.) With luck, the first two episodes may turn out to be a clumsy transition to a fresher set of story lines. The re-election campaign of the unscrupulous Governor Devlin (Zeljko Ivanek) has possibilities, and this season's line-up of guest stars -- including Edward Herrmann, David Johansen, and Gavin MacLeod (!) -- is intriguing. Then again, the series could be descending into camp (which would explain why the openly gay inmates seem to be getting more screen time this season).

The bigger problem is that Oz isn't ever likely to match the shock and excitement of its first season, when the series obliterated the idea that anyone could find redemption in a prison cell. Unfortunately, HBO has already scheduled the fifth season of Oz to begin next January -- as compensation for the delayed third season of The Sopranos, which will begin in April. The Sopranos had a fine second season, but its sense of excitement is also wearing off, and I'm not exactly salivating over a probable fourth season of Sex and the City next year.

HBO hasn't launched a major series since The Sopranos, with the exception of limited-run programs like this spring's excellent The Corner. Its reluctance is understandable, since many critics are itching to write about the station's first bomb. Maybe HBO could schedule a decoy series -- something not merely forced and unfunny, like Arli$$, but mind-bogglingly bad, like a CBS sit-com without Ray Romano -- to hurry the critical backlash along before unveiling a legitimate follow-up to The Sopranos. If HBO coasts on its successes for too much longer, even the new stuff on Comedy Central might start to look good.

One of HBO's handicaps may be its association with adult material -- i.e., violence, nudity, and raw language that can't be found on broadcast television. Given this focus, it's not surprising that the station didn't make a bid for Freaks and Geeks, the circa-1980 high-school comedy drama that scrambled for a new home after being cancelled by NBC this spring. Earlier this week, it was announced that Freaks reruns will be aired on the Fox Family Channel (on Tuesday nights, beginning August 29), and there's a slim chance that Fox will find the money to produce some new episodes of the series.

It's good news that this gem wound up somewhere on the dial, but I fear that the smartly written series still won't find an audience, not when it's on the same channel as reruns of 7th Heaven and Providence. NBC burned off three installments of the show last Saturday night, and the ratings were terrible overall, but the audience size jumped considerably for the 10 p.m. episode -- suggesting that Freaks should have aired at that late hour all along. Sometimes an "adult" series isn't so easy to spot.

WITH ALL THE COVERAGE of this summer's cut-rate candid-camera shows, it's easy to overlook the more carefully crafted documentaries on television. The latter category includes public television's P.O.V. (Tuesdays at 10 p.m.), a weekly series of independent films. This week's installment, Elizabeth Thompson's Blink, profiles a former leader in the white-supremacist movement who now speaks out against racism. (Oz's Vern Schillinger doesn't seem ready for a similar change of heart.)

Blink is almost a parody of the Lifetime Channel's Intimate Portraits, or all those E! documentaries about celebrities who have overcome eating disorders and bad haircuts so they can find happiness by appearing in stupid movies. It opens with Greg Withrow, a 40ish redhead with anxious eyes, pointing to an old photo of himself -- not in a college yearbook but in a psychology text, where he's identified as an example of someone suffering from "cognitive dissonance," or irrational views. Blink chronicles Withrow's rise in the racist skinhead hierarchy and his repudiation of the movement after falling in love with a woman whose (non-Jewish) family had been persecuted in Nazi Germany. The documentary also includes clips from both of his appearances on the Phil Donahue show -- as a racist and as an ex-racist. Sounding very much like an overworked movie actor who finally learned how to slow down and appreciate life, Withrow talks about his epiphany: strolling down a beach one day with his girlfriend, he regretted not being able to take off his shirt because of the gun and the knife he always had strapped to his body. "The thought of something better was just a blink away," he explains.

Thompson's documentary is not so simplistic. She's skeptical of Withrow's more sensational claims, like his story about how skinheads nailed him to a cross for his betrayal. Blink also dissects his "redemption" story, as played out in the media, and how it can give white Americans the illusion that racism has been pushed to the margins of society.

Blink is followed, on July 25, by Stephen Olsson's Our House in Havana, which follows a former socialite on a visit to Cuba after 40 years of exile in the United States. The 68-year-old Silvia Morini, accompanied by her son, returns to her family's palatial home (now a government exchange bank) and the Havana Yacht Club (now open to all the riff-raff of Cuba). Our House is often amusing, as the self-absorbed Morini talks to her former servants (who are clearly not heartbroken over the Morinis' property losses) and recounts how she publicly scolded Fidel Castro in 1960 for stirring up class tensions (he got over it).

Both Blink and Havana are about oddball people who, in talking to the filmmakers, probably revealed more about themselves than they intended. You can't ask for much more than that out of "reality" television.