Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
2 - How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 November 2022
- Frontmatter
- Table of Contents
- The Captivating Aspirations of Post-Network Quality Television in the Age of Mass Incarceration: An Introduction
- 1 Mass (Mediating) Incarceration
- 2 How Does Violent Spectacle Appear as TV Realism? Sources of OZ’s Penal Imaginary
- 3 If It’s Not TV, is It Sociology? The Wire
- 4 Is Entertainment the New Activism? Orange Is the New Black, Women’s Imprisonment, and the Taste for Prisons
- 5 Can Melodrama Redeem American History? Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Queen Sugar
- Conclusion: American Politics and Prison Reform after TV’s Digital Turn
- Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
Abstract
OZ is widely regarded as the first fictional American TV drama to explore the opaque back-stages of the criminal justice system. Celebrated for its ostensible “realism,” the series utilizes the hyper-mediated cultural form of the prison as a site which self-consciously generates and puts into circulation stories and images of grotesque and nightmarish violence in order to repeatedly transgress the boundaries of televisual decorum. It therefore ends up reinforcing TV's reliance upon spectacle and, in the process, reifies the prison's own most naturalized claims to legitimate institutional reproduction. However, its tendency to constantly recycle increasingly strange figures through repeating cycles of narrative decline ultimately explodes its own sense of realism, rendering the very notion hauntingly bizarre in the process.
Keywords: OZ, prison theory, TV realism, hyper-reality, spectacle, naturalism and the gothic
Welcome to OZ
OZ, which premiered in 1997 and ran for six reasons, is widely believed to be the first US-American television drama to take place almost entirely inside a prison. Set inside an experimental rehabilitation unit called Emerald City (Em’ City for short), which is in turn housed in the fictional maximum-security prison Oswald State Penitentiary, OZ follows the ambiguous moral careers, shuffling alliances, and violent activities of its diverse, ensemble cast of prison staff and prisoners as they organize themselves into ethnic gangs and vie for power within the confines of the unit. OZ has been described as “a testosterone-driven soap opera for guys” (Axmaker) which works hard to push the envelope in terms of graphic televisual content. The result is a series which has won praise for its gritty “realism” and for tackling previously taboo topics such as homosexuality and drug addiction just as often as it received harsh criticism for its exaggerated and excessive deployment of violence.
OZ holds a special, if contested, place in TV lore; the series is often hailed as an influential forerunner for the contemporary “quality” TV drama. Allen Sepinwall has called OZ “the first revolutionary cable drama of the period” and hailed it as “the foundation for everything that followed” (Sepinwall 19).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- American Mass Incarceration and Post-Network Quality TelevisionCaptivating Aspirations, pp. 53 - 104Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2022