Even nearly three decades removed, HBO’s first hour-long drama, “Oz,” feels unique. I’ve seen dozens of brilliant, groundbreaking HBO shows — OGs like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” or “Six Feet Under” — that debuted after Tom Fontana’s iconic prison drama, but “Oz” remains a singular work that you can’t pair with any other thematically similar cable drama. It’s about vicious criminals, gangs, guards, and everything else you normally see in a prison story, but it’s not traditional by any means. Fontana had no interest in creating a conventional narrative or portraying stereotypical characters that you’ve seen many times before. “Oz” was bold, confident and experimental, and it already showed in its pilot.
As the creator recalled in an oral history published on Yahoo, Chris Albrecht (former CEO of HBO) asked him: “What is the one thing you are absolutely not allowed to do on television?” to which he said, “Kill the pilot’s pilot.” » Then Albrecht exhorted him: “Well, then go ahead and do it.” He did as he was told, and all of this happened in 1997, when most TV shows didn’t dare defy these fundamental rules of storytelling. So when this happened, it came as something of a shock (and still is to some extent) to unsuspecting viewers who watched the pilot. This was just the first in a long series of rule violations committed by “Oz” over six seasons between 1997 and 2003.
Jon Seda was the victim of such a twist, but he was compensated for his early exit
Before “Oz” premiered, it was promoted with Jon Seda’s Dino Ortolani — a convicted murder inmate sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole — as the series’ lead. The pilot revolves around his character, telling his story and how he ended up in Oz, only to kill him at the end, in a brutal and surprising way. When Fontana hired Seda, he told him up front that his character would have a fairly short life on the show, and he was “cool” with that, according to the creator. At the end of the pilot, Dino is lit by another inmate and burns alive. Seda spoke about what the whole experience was like for him, saying:
“You’re talking about going out in a blaze of glory, right? The way it was shot was pretty crazy. I remember seeing the model that they had made up in the makeup trailer, and I said, ‘Oh my God, that model looks like me!’ During filming, I remember looking up and saying to Tim [McAdams]’Hey, hey, hey, don’t really turn it on.’ Many times he kept forgetting about it and turning it on. I’m like, ‘Wait! You’re going to drop this on my face, idiot!’
Fontana was also the uncredited co-creator alongside James Yoshimura of the hit crime series “Homicide: Life on the Street”, which aired on NBC for seven seasons between 1993 and 1999. So, as compensation for his brief but memorable role in “Oz,” he cast Seda in the final two seasons as Paul Falsone, a Baltimore police detective, who became a recurring character in the show’s final two seasons. It certainly wasn’t a bad deal since he ended up starring in two of the most influential and beloved crime dramas of the ’90s.
