Not to mention Beecher's father getting stabbed to death in the prison. A civilian death inside Oz should've had that place locked down for good.
Or that C.O getting his damn eyes cut out of his head. Imagine if such a thing happened in a real prison?
How bad is security at OZ? Two or three times a gun in smuggled in and used in a murder. Plus that Irish dude managing to plant explosives in the cafeteria and blow up half the prison (only for the prison to return the following season exactly how it was). And oh yeah, the face there doesn't seem to be a
single surveillance camera in the whole freaking facility. I feel like everyone who worked there did enough to be fired five times over.
I don't know if any television show will ever come up with a plot as hilariously stupid as the accelerated aging pill. How that ever even reached the conceptual stage, I'll never know.
Killing off Adebisi hurt the show badly. While it was probably a natural and logical conclusion to that story thread (Adebisi had to go down somehow in some way) his absence robbed the show of its most menacing and terrifying presence. Especially since his 'replacement' was Old Man Stroke Victim, who wasn't the least bit intimidating. Killing Adebisi probably should have been reserved for the very end.
I know it seems like I'm railing on the show hard, but I did enjoy most of it by and large. And being the first HBO show produced in-house, it paved the way for some serious quality down the line for all premium television. It was a true pioneer.
One thing I did like about the latter seasons was bringing back deceased characters over the course of the show as guest narrators for the final season. Those were excellent. Also, I know it bummed a lot of people out, but I thought Beecher finally ****ing his life up for good was a pretty apt conclusion to his arc. Sort of a commentary on the penitentiary system's failure to rehabilitate and tendency only to make criminals into worse criminals.
During the making of Oz, if you were on the show and late to the set, your character stood a very good chance of being raped or killed in the next episode. Can't remember where I heard that, but it was apparently true.
I do seem to recall John Lurie in an interview saying that persistent ****ing up your lines meant you had to do a full-frontal nude scene.
