Editorial Reviews and
DVD Information about Oz - The Complete Third Season
Product Description
Oz: the name on the street for the Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary - except they've just changed the name. It's now the "Oswald State Correctional Facility: Level Four." Maybe it's truth in advertising. Maybe by getting rid of the word "penitentiary" the state is finally admitting that nobody's penitent. Nobody's sorry. Nobody.Running Time: 480 min.System Requirements:Running Time 480Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA Rating: NR UPC: 026359907920 Manufacturer No: 99079
Amazon.com
A volatile men-in-prison soap opera, fueled by testosterone and lubricated by blood, HBO's Oz is addictive viewing. The third season of the most violent show on cable TV, set in a cage of concrete and steel and glass, opens with echoes of violence past. Miguel Alvarez (Kirk Acevedo) is in solitary confinement for brutally blinding a guard, one-time drug lord Simon Adebissi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) mourns for his murdered father, and Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen) nurses bones broken by Aryan Brotherhood leader Schillinger (J.K. Simmons) and a heart broken by the betrayal of Keller (Law and Order: SVU's Christopher Meloni). Their stories of vengeance, redemption, and forgiveness anchor this season. The show races through each episode with a driving pace that only intensifies the ferocity. But for all the show's physical brutality, the most affecting violence is emotional, from the strange and savage love affair between Beecher and Keller to the escalating war of terror between Beecher and Schillinger. On a lighter note, this season marks the debut of both Miss Sally and new prison CO Sean Murphy (Robert Clohessy), whose understated strength is too often overlooked in the face of the show's more explosive personalities. Season 3 ends pitched on a powder keg, with the fuse in the hands of the show's most ferocious, unpredictable character. It's the kind of promise that will have you slavering for season 4. The three-disc set features all eight episodes along with a season 2 recap, episode recaps and previews, commentary on the episode "Unnatural Disasters" by writer-creator Tom Fontana and episode director Chazz Palmintieri, and 22 minutes of deleted scenes. --Sean Axmaker
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Customer Reviews for Oz - The Complete Third Season
Excellent
I have loved this series since it has aired and continue to watch all the episodes. It is a incrediable drama.Oz - The Complete Third Season
A MUST SEE!
This season of OZ will knock your socks off! It will leave you wanting more!Oz - The Complete Third Season
Incredible.
The first season of Oz introduced our (huge) cast of main characters. The second season was dedicated mostly to intergroup struggles: the battles of drug dealers, crime lords and gang bangers. With the spectacular third season, Oz presented a mix of the best of seasons one and two by giving us character development within a story about a larger, rising struggle.
On the personal end, each of our main characters has problems. Beecher, betrayed badly by his boyfriend Keller at the end of season two, is out for revenge against Keller and his friends. Keller, remorseful and desirous of Beecher, is willing to do anything to get Beecher back--including seduce a nun and kill. Sister Peter Marie comes to realize that she is a woman before being a nun, while Schillinger must choose between his family and his beliefs. Augustus Hill finds out a shocking secret, Miguel Alvarez struggles with depression, the warden faces his past...and that's just some of the main characters.
While Season Two had a bit of a problem juggling all of the events and people introduced, everything has been hammered out in Season Three. It's particularly impressive that each of these personal storylines wove together and finally became part of a much larger story: one of budding racial tension in the prison. Who stays impartial, who wants equal rights, and who turns to racism? The answers might surprise you.
The only warning I can give about Season Three (and Oz in general) is that crack is less addicting than this show. I began Season One thinking I'd just watch an episode or two...and was up until 6 in the morning, desperate to know what was next. Be careful...and enjoy.Oz - The Complete Third Season
Oz - you won;t want to leave
I was hooked from season 1. One of the best series that I have come across in a long time. Once you view it, you will want to see the whole series.Oz - The Complete Third Season
Oz makes the leap
After a somewhat disappointing second season, Oz came back with a vengeance for its third go-round, finally making good on the promise of its excellent first season. The show does, as usual, contain its share of implausibilities (although not to the extent that the fourth season does), but its insight into people and the institutions they create, along with its odd mix of realism and sensationalism, more than make up for any gaps in credibility. Its murderer's row of a cast is in fine form once again, even with characters frequently coming and going, and the volatility of the characters and storytelling is, as usual, cranked to the max. The show's disturbing violence gained it a good deal of notoriety, and this season does feature some truly imaginative (and imaginatively filmed) murders, but the killings, maimings, and beatings are just one manifestation of its pedal-to-the-metal intensity and visceral impact.
Its intimate, pressure-cooker setting gives Oz an ideal platform for developing characters and constantly shifting interpersonal dynamics, and this season sees the further development of several lingering plotlines from the first two seasons, along with plenty of new shocks to be found. Essentially, Oz examines prison life from three perspectives-the groups that dominate life among the inmates, the unfortunate few who have to find a way to survive without the protection of a prominent organization, and the staff who have to try to keep a lid on everything-and all three end up getting plenty of attention this season. Fontana has said that Oz was intended to be a microcosm of the world at large, and this season certainly fulfills that goal, partly with its frequent and savage outbreaks of violence, but more in its penetrating examination of the varied and contradictory sides of human nature. Above all else, it's the self-contained universe Oz establishes that makes it such an addictive show-an environment where violence, greed, and racism are nothing less than survival mechanisms and anything even resembling a virtue can be turned into a weakness. In Oz, even a prison boxing tournament designed to provide the inmates with a release turns into the focus of endless intrigue and division, not to mention murder.
The third season's main focus, especially in its last few episodes, is on the mounting racial divisions in Oz, which are handled in a surprisingly organic manner, with a series of seemingly unrelated incidents serving to divide the inmates almost completely by skin tone. Naturally, the race-based tensions are exploited by the show's leading villains: Nigerian-born drug lord Simon Adebisi and Nazi hatemonger Vern Schillinger, both of whom belong in the hall of fame for memorably evil TV characters. Played in career-making fashion by Adewale Akkinuoye-Agbaje, who's as physically imposing as Shaq and a much better actor, Adebisi is a smirking, menacing presence, the sort of magnetic villain you can't help but enjoy watching even as his machinations reach new levels of deceit and depravity. For his part, the glowering, sadistic Schillinger always manages to couch his actions in the rhetoric of rightneousness, but he seems less concerned with improving the fortunes of the white race than with brutalizing and terrorizing any fellow inmates he sees fit, regardless of color. That said, J.K. Simmons always manages to make Schillinger believable and even occasionally human, never more so than when his son gets sent to Emerald City and quickly finds himself in over his head.
Now, since I'm not quite out of things to say, here are a few bullet points regarding this season:
-The second season established a set of fractured relationships among the inmates, but they're really developed to their fullest extent in the third season. Sometimes the show's plotlines can admittedly veer a bit into soap-opera territory, but in the most compelling character arcs-the ongoing comingling of love, distrust, and violence between Beecher and Keller; Ryan O'Reilly's stewardship of his brain-damaged brother, which walks a fine line between protection and exploitation; and of course the severed bond between Schillinger and his son-there's a rawness to the emotions of those involved that few shows can match.
-It's on this season that Kareem Said becomes a pantheon TV character, right up there with the likes of Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey. Said was a fierce, galvanizing figure from the show's beginning, and as the third season progresses it reveals more of the internal conflicts and unshakable convictions that end up costing him dearly even among the other Muslims. Eammon Walker really gets inside Said's character this season, lending him new levels of complexity with practically every facial expression and line of dialogue, turning Said into a figure who's unflinchingly principled but far from bloodless or unrelatable.
-In spite of all the betrayal, murder, and everything else, it's not all doom and gloom in Oz. As in real life, there is the occasional tender moment, such as elderly lifer Rebadow finally getting to meet his grandson, and loads of offbeat humor, especially with the introduction of children's TV host and inmate lust object Miss Sally. Plus there's the ongoing saga of creepy death-row inmate Shirley Bellinger, which adds little to the show but does take some interesting twists towards season's end.
And yeah, that's pretty much it. If you liked the first two seasons of Oz, the third season offers everything that was good about them and plenty more. All fans of fierce, intelligent TV owe it a look.Oz - The Complete Third Season
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