Hill was the one character allowed to be pure observer in the Emerald City, as the prison's experimental unit was called. A recently published book, 'Oz: Behind These Walls - The Journal of Augustus Hill' (HarperCollins), provides a history of Oz through Hill's eyes. Augustus Hill is really a creation of Tom Fontana and me trying to bring it to life.'Īugustus Hill is the one character from the series maintaining his voice after the show leaves the air. And fortunately there was never anything that he said that we couldn't work in. 'I would try and make sense of each new piece of information as it came along,' Perrinau explained by telephone from Los Angeles, California, 'and we'd work it into the character. Harold Perrinau, who plays Augustus Hill, the wheelchair-bound narrator of the series, described how the writers and actors were able to work together to develop the myriad story lines that permeate 'Oz.' The writers had a lot of help from the cast. Harold Perrinau played the wheelchair-bound Augustus Hill, 'Oz' observer and 'author' of a new book on the show. 'I'd write one character's story for all eight episodes, then the next character, while one of the other writers may be working on pieces of another character's story.'

The emphasis was on telling the prisoners' stories and developing their characters, a tall order for a show with a cast the size of 'Oz.' The HBO Web site lists at least 26 current characters, with many more having bitten the dust over the years.įontana himself speculated that he wrote some 75 percent of the material for all six seasons, though not in an episode-by-episode sequence. Still, it wasn't his primary concern to make political statements. But, he added, 'as the years have gone by I have become more radicalized in the sense that I still believe criminals should be in prisons, but I'm not 100 percent sure that this system is really solving any of the problems related to crime in our country.'

Elsewhere' - Fontana had no particular axe to grind with the American penal system at the outset. The initial intent was 'really to go to a place that had never been explored in fictional television, and tell as many good stories as I could possibly tell,' he said.ĭespite his record with 'gritty' television series - Fontana also co-created 'Homicide: Life on the Street,' and had a hand in 'St. 'Oz' has never shied away from the darker sides of human behavior, and Tom Fontana, who created the show, says that was the point. Just another day in the life for the inmates of 'Oz.' But not for long.Īfter six seasons, on Sunday the fictional maximum-security Oswald State Penitentiary at the center of HBO's hard-edged dramatic series will be having its final lockdown.

Oz tv show seasons