A kick in the head

The return of HBO's Oz; plus, MTV's Celebrity Deathmatch

by Robert David Sullivan

I found Emerald City in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan. More specifically, I found the season-premiere party for HBO's prison drama Oz a couple of weeks ago at a trendy new restaurant called Markt (nope, no "e"). The place was packed with cast and crew members not only from Oz (Wednesdays at 10 p.m., with new episodes beginning July 14) but also from HBO's other hot drama series, The Sopranos, and from NBC's recently cancelled Homicide: Life on the Street. With just one good pipe bomb, the TV crime genre could have been blasted back to the age of Starsky and Hutch.

It is still legal to make jokes about violence, right? Otherwise, the crew at Comedy Central's Upright Citizens Brigade would be in a lot of trouble for last week's skit in which a high-school student tried to massacre his classmates with ninja throwing stars. (The attempt failed because he threw like a girl.) And there would be hell to pay for all the levity I witnessed at the party for Oz, which may be the most violent show on television -- in intensity if not in sheer number of corpses. In addition to the usual shootings and stabbings, characters have been set on fire, nailed to a floor, and slowly poisoned with ground glass.

There were some disconcerting moments at the party. I spotted J.K. Simmons, who plays stonehearted white-supremacist Vern Schillinger, smiling at a baby he held in his arms, and my first impulse was to call the cops. After the screening of Oz's season premiere in a nearby cinema, Tom Mardirosian (he plays the inmate who came up with the idea of building an escape tunnel, then caused it to cave in on two other prisoners) genially explained to a fan, "It's ironic. We all hate each other on the show, but we all love each other in real life." Out on the sidewalk, Tony Sirico of The Sopranos ("Paulie"), menacingly dressed in a dark pinstripe suit and polo shirt, happily signed autographs, and James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano himself) patiently waited in the buffet line at Markt. Despite the long wait to get at the food, nobody shot anyone's toe off.

It was a nightmare come true for right-wingers blaming pop culture for all the sins in this country: a bunch of New Yorkers in expensive clothes laughing over cocktails about inventive ways to kill someone on camera. If only someone had thought to nail a copy of the Ten Commandments over the bar . . .

I admit I was taken aback by the audience's cheering at an especially gruesome bit of violence in the Oz episode. The victim certainly didn't deserve any sympathy, but I felt anguish for the character who had been reduced to lashing out like a wild animal. It's the same feeling I got from countless similar scenes in the previous 16 episodes of Oz, and I guess I always assumed that other viewers were reacting the same way. Perhaps Oz is best watched on a small screen in a tiny apartment, the better to appreciate the effects of claustrophobia on the human psyche.

Indeed, in its third season Oz is as compulsively watchable as ever, with a quick pace, flawless acting, and serpentine plots unmatched by any other television series. All the major characters are back, including prison guard Diane Wittlesley (Edie Falco, also of The Sopranos); Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), recuperating from an attack by Schillinger that left him with four broken limbs; and Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo), whose sentence of lifetime solitary confinement hasn't lessened his role on the series. Their incredible luck -- good, bad, and worse -- can be credited to Tom Fontana, who produces the show with Barry Levinson and wrote the next five episodes with Bradford Winters. Added to the mix this summer are such celebrity directors as Matt Dillon and Steve Buscemi; guest stars including Uta Hagen and Anne Meara; and new regulars including Schillinger's murderous son and a sexually aggressive female guard who goes after self-righteous prison administrator Tim McManus (Terry Kinney).

All this talent produces a series that's nasty and graphic even by cable-TV standards, and it's fair to ask whether Oz justifies its use of violence. I don't think the show is meant to be a realistic portrayal of prison life, which would be a poor excuse to splatter blood all over our TV screens anyway. Who needs to be told that criminals are capable of violence? Fontana and company undoubtedly do a lot of research on how prisons operate, but Oz still gets a little more implausible with each episode, if only because no state would allow so many grudges and favors and illicit deals to build up within such a tiny group of prisoners. After a deadly riot and the frequent murders of prisoners and guards alike, Oswald State Penitentiary would have been taken apart, brick by brick, a couple of years ago. Instead, the place is simply renamed the Oswald State Correctional Facility in next week's episode, leading Oz narrator Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) to speculate, "Maybe the state is finally admitting that nobody is penitent."

Oz certainly isn't a cautionary tale in the tradition of Scared Straight or a testament to the human spirit like The Shawshank Redemption. The punishment rarely fits the crime at Oswald (one guy falsely confesses to a murder because death row is the only safe place for him in prison), and character improvements are never permanent. Last season, for example, a character won celebrity status and a governor's pardon on the basis of his poetry; he promptly shot someone at a book signing and was sent back to Oz. And the violence doesn't seem to be a tortured metaphor for the way "civilized" people acquire wealth or fame. Corrupt politicians are inevitable on Oz, but so far we've been spared any parallels between drug dealers and businessmen who kill through pollution and starvation wages.

So is there any point to the violence on Oz? Can I explain why I'm absorbed in the series even though one reason I'm a television buff is that I hate gratuitously violent movies? Well, I'm fascinated by the closed-circle environment of Oswald prison, where an inmate has no choice but to fight back when his survival is threatened. The violence itself is not seductive, but I think most people are intrigued by a situation where all the mundane decisions that fill up our daily lives -- what to eat, how to dress, whether to return a phone call -- have been taken away from an individual, leaving him with nothing to do but plot against other men in the same situation. There's a perversely attractive image of a close-knit community in Oz, where each person's very existence affects everyone else. There's no "bowling alone" here, and no one is left out when the Aryans and the Muslims and the Christians all choose sides. Of course, when every action has a thousand reactions, you end up with a lot of unintended consequences, and that's where things get interesting.

Oz makes the case that a humane society must treat its most inhumane citizens with dignity (the clerical characters of Rita Moreno and B.D. Wong are as single-minded in pursuit of mercy as the gang leaders are in pursuit of power), but Fontana and company are too smart to suggest that the right hug at the right instance would have diverted any of the inmates from a life of crime. Even so, I keep thinking back to the episode from last season in which Oz's warden (Ernie Hudson) ordered Miguel Alvarez to stand in a corner of his office all day, like a dog that's been ordered to heel. Alvarez later gouged out the eyes of a guard in one of the series's most horrific scenes, but his quiet humiliation in the warden's office still has more resonance for me, which seems to be some kind of proof that Oz isn't just a cheap excuse for violence.

Early in next week's episode, Alvarez rouses himself from sleep in order to relieve himself, get dressed, and lie back down on his cot. ("No man wants to think about himself all day," says Augustus Hill in a voiceover.) It's a pathetic image, and a reminder that, all their elaborate schemes notwithstanding, most of the inmates in Oz are just killing time. All of us contemplate this awful possibility, and if we're lucky we find reason to reject it. The crowd at Markt had such a reason, and they deserved to celebrate.

THERE ARE LOTS of bloody TV shows with no redeeming value, and MTV's tedious Celebrity Deathmatch (Thursdays at 10 p.m.) is near the top of the list. In each segment of this claymation series, two persons we're all sick of, like Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr, attack each other with silly props until one or both are killed. Sometimes the hosts of Deathmatch simply execute the contestants, as when Alex Trebek was shoved into a "soundproof booth" and mashed into a reddish pulp and Pat Sajak had his face sliced off by a spinning Wheel of Fortune. Because the set-up and the punch line of every scene are the same -- a hunk of clay looks like a person, then it doesn't -- none of the other jokes matters. Example: when Clinton enters the ring, we see a bunch of Monica Lewinsky look-alikes among the spectators. If you're able to pat yourself on the back for "getting" this reference, you might be satisfied by the level of political satire on Celebrity Cockfight -- er, Deathmatch.

If there's a point, it seems to be that famous persons are too stupid to live (why else would they appear on this show?). In contrast to Oz, the victims here are as far removed from humanity as possible. It's easier to identify with Tom and Jerry, who at least tap into a hunter-and-prey kind of relationship found in many corporate boardrooms and marriages. The creators of Celebrity Deathmatch are guilty of a violent waste of time, and there's no reason for you to become an accomplice.