Studio: Hbo Home Video Release Date: 04/17/2007

The heightened reality of Oz remains consistently engrossing in the fourth season of HBO's volatile prison drama. All 16 episodes were written or cowritten by series creator Tom Fontana, and are bookended by the wisely sardonic observations of paraplegic prisoner Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), whose terse, philosophical ruminations about life in "Oz" give the series its literate edge. The 2000-2001 season finds Oz in the wake of racial warfare; tensions remain high among the factions that make the "Em City" cell block a hotbed of seething animosity among the skinhead Aryans led by Shillinger (J.K. Simmons); Muslim splinter groups led by Kareem Said (Eamonn Walker), the fearsome Adebisi (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and Supreme Allah (Lord Jamar); and the resident Mafia, Latinos, and lowlifes who make up Em City's embroiled population of newcomers, hard-timers, and death-row inmates. Unit Administrator McManus (Terry Kinney) sets up a centrally located penalty cage for anyone who causes outbreaks of violence (which are shockingly frequent and frequently lethal), but loses his job in a mid-season plot development that spins Oz into a maelstrom of internal politics and brutal retaliation.

Through it all, Fontana and his collaborators (including guest director Steve Buscemi) maintain impressive focus on dozens of finely drawn characters. Laced with homosexual tension, jealousies, religious fervor, and threats of betrayal, the season's most compelling conflicts involve impulsive killer Ryan O'Reily (played with cagey menace by Dean Winters) and his brain-damaged half-brother Cyril (Scott William Winters); and the manipulative Keller (Christopher Meloni) and his prison lover Toby Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a lawyer and convicted murderer whose survival seems perpetually uncertain. Tenuous order is barely maintained by warden Glynn (Ernie Hudson) and Catholic counselor "Sister Pete" (Rita Moreno), but the bulk of Oz's fourth season is devoted to chaos, as shifting loyalties keep all prisoners (and all viewers) in a state of anxious anticipation. The criminal histories of many inmates are shown in flashback, and one death-row scenario (involving guest star Kathryn Erbe) reaches its inevitable conclusion. By the time episode 16 ends with a blazing inferno, you'll be wondering about the fate of Rev. Cloutier (Luke Perry) and anxious for the tumultuous events of season 5. (Commentary accompanies two episodes: Fontana and Moreno offer informative anecdotes on "You Bet Your Life," but the Fontana/Winters/Tergesen commentary on "Famous Last Words" is raucously undisciplined and for hardcore Oz fans only.)--Jeff Shannon

2 discs didnt even play they skipped so bad you couldnt even watch them. One side of disc 2 wouldnt even load. I very unhappy and I had to buy the season again just so I could watch it. I would give you zero stars but I cant figure out how to

This is a positive review, but first I feel obligated to warn potential viewers of just how bloody this season is, even compared to previous ones. A man getting his neck snapped while giving a blow job, a child getting mutilated (mostly off screen, thankfully) and an inmate being buried alive are some of the more shocking twists. These scenes are not too common, nor are they the main point of the show, but they are there.

In season four, racial tensions in Oz are at the breaking point. A white boy shoots down several black inmates and so the black population decides to take things into their own hands. Muslim leader Kareem Said and former section leader of Em City Tim McManus have a plan to stop the resultant violence...if they live long enough.

Taking up just as much time are the stories of the prisoners' daily lives. Season four has sixteen episodes instead of the usual eight, so all the characters we've come to know and love (or despise) get their time in the spotlight. Struggles with faith, friendship, love and family are the primary plot points this season as several inmates develop new relationships and find lost family members and/or religious beliefs. Many of the vilest inmates struggle for redemption, and some of them get it. Others don't.

As in previous seasons, everyman Tobias Beecher centers the show. His romance with sociopath Chris Keller hits a new low as the pair spend months trying to find ways to hurt each other after breaking up. Do they love each other enough to put aside their differences when one really needs the other? Meanwhile, Tobias's growing friendship with Kareem Said forces both to examine dark parts of their souls, while his ongoing (since season one) war with Vern Schillinger takes away part of his family, which in turn takes part of his sanity. Through all the horror, his attempts to keep his compassion are courageous and admirable, though he doesn't always succeed.

Various other plotlines thread through. Some work and others don't. On the positive end there are stories like that of the four death row inmates in Oz's walls; their conversations made for some of the most touching and best written scenes in the show. On the other hand there are a few ideas that border on absurd, such as Oz becoming a hotel for Chinese refugees and a romance between a woman and the man that murdered her husband.

Fortunately, most of the season and all of the acting is good enough that a few stray plot bunnies are forgivable. Season four of Oz is an emotionally intense, often shocking roller coaster that you won't want to stop watching. Make sure to clear a lot of time for yourself before you turn it on.

To most fans of HBO's Oz, season four is split up into two parts. Why the creators decided to make it one season escapes me considering the two parts have about as much in common as any other seasons do. The most likely reason is that the length between the two parts was only six months as opposed to the regular year. This only helps the fans though as all sixteen episodes are packaged in one set and costs the exact same as the others. Oz has always been one of the most graphic shows to ever air on TV so if you don't like violence, nudity or anything of that sort, Oz is probably the worst show you could watch. If you are a fan of a character based drama where the rich storylines that are continuously brought up over the shows six year run, Oz is the show for you.

Oz is short for the Oswald State Correctional facility a prison where the inmates are among the worst you'll ever see. The bulk of the show revolves around one unit called Emerald City where the inmates are given extra privileges provided they hold a job, behave, and strive to become better people. Of course this doesn't exactly matter and every episode features at least one death of an inmate. The show does deal with the better side of some inmates and shows us that there is some good in prisoners.

Season 4 Part 1 is about when Tim McManus, creator of Emerald City is fired and his replacement Martin Querns turns out to be worse than he is. Querns believes that violence is the only problems and lets the most dangerous inmate Simon Adebisi does as he pleases as long as violence is kept to a minimum. Querns transfers most of the white inmates out of Emerald City and the remaining white inmates plan to get rid of him. This part of the season has a shocking ending only Oz would provide and things return to normal.

Season 4 Part 2 is more like a typical Oz season. McManus is back and tries to retain order while several prison gangs attempt to take control of the drug trade. Irish inmate Ryan O'Reilly tries to keep his mentally retarded brother Cyril from having violent outbursts and McManus arranges a basketball game against former NBA inmate Jackson Vahue. Narrator August Hill's stepfather, a Vietnam vet by the name of Burr Redding arrives to take control of the Homeboys and the drug trade. All in all this is one of the most action packed seasons of Oz.

Oz is unlike any show I've ever seen. Things that happen in each episode than one might consider irrelevant show up years later to haunt whoever committed the action. Characters you think are dead miraculously show up out of nowhere. Oz also features many actors who appeared on shows like Lost, all four Law & Orders (Christopher Meloni and B.D. Wong were cast members of both Law & Order SVU and Oz at the same time), Homicide: Life on the Street, The Wire, and many more. Oz is one of the best written shows I've ever watched and I'm sure if you give it a try you'll be hooked I know I was.

Until a few months ago I had never even heard of Oz. My boyfriend brought home the complete first season one day so we popped it in the DVD player and I've been hooked ever since. I quickly bought seasons two, three, and I've just completed the fourth season. Seasons one through three were the absolute best television there is. Being an Oz fan I much enjoyed season four but in all honestly it lacked what the first three seasons had.

One thing I didn't like is that they had so many different stories going on at the same time it was like they would spent three or four minutes on something that could have had potential (especially the main characters)if they would have only detailed it out more and left all of the bull stories out. I'm talking about the Chinese refugees, the aging pill, and etc. Especially the aging pill - what was the point in that?!? And most of what was going on never had a conclusion, it just left you hanging. It almost seemed like they just pulled a bunch of random ideas down from space and threw them randomly into this season. I was very disappointed but I still think the show is the best there is.

Coming off the nearly unmitigated brilliance of its third season, season four of Oz sees the show facing the tall order of maintaining the high standards of writing and acting that had characterized much of its history, and more often than not it's a success. This season is certainly not without its problems, some of them more damaging than others, but the show's visceral and emotional intensity is still very much in evidence, and even a flawed season of Oz is better than just about anything else. Season four picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of season three, with racial animosity in Oswald State Penitentiary at an all-time high, the psychotic Adebisi in possession of a gun and waiting for an opportunity to maximize its destructive potential, Beecher and Keller continuing their tumultuous gay love affair while Nazi leader Schillinger nurses a grudge against both, and Officer Whittlesy suddenly nowhere to be found (a circumstance certainly owing nothing whatsoever to Edie Falco's newfound success on The Sopranos). Naturally, it's not long before a dramatic catastrophe shakes up the already precarious situation in Emerald City and brings about a new level of disorder accompanied by a wild surfeit of plotlines and a level of bloodletting that's excessive even by Oz's lofty standards.

All the killing actually becomes a problem for the show as this season progresses--the constant murders begin to feel increasingly gratuitous after a while, to say nothing of the rather odd fact that nobody seems to have much interest in solving them. Obviously a prison show is going to rely heavily on the violence factor, but I think the creators of Oz could've distributed the killings far more judiciously and plausibly--The Sopranos, The Shield, and The Wire all take place in violent environments, but they've still managed to maintain an element of shock and impact when a character gets killed off. On Oz, especially in this season, the deaths (with a few exceptions) and the resulting revolving-door effect on the cast contributed to a somewhat numbing quality that pervades much of the season. Granted, there is the compensating plus of a train-wreck effect, as I often found myself literally unable to look away from all the carnage, but a little more realism would've gone a long way.

In an equally frustrating development, Oz seemed to develop a severe case of ADD in its fourth season, seeing its already somewhat fragmentary plot development crushed under the weight of a huge and fluctuating cast and an emphasis on momentum over coherence. With double the series's usual complement of episodes, we see a small army of new characters come through Oswald-among them an IRA fugitive on the run since Bloody Sunday, a pack of Chinese refugees, a legion of black street thugs, and a whole bunch of other guys I can barely remember-and few of these new arrivals are around long enough to make much of an impression. The result is a nonstop barrage of plotlines centered on sex, violence, backstabbing, and double-dealing among the inmates and staff, with character development often feeling perfunctory. Drug-addled, unpredictable new arrival Omar White, played by Michael Wright, is perhaps the best example of the problems in focus that largely characterize Oz's fourth season. He comes in at the halfway point with the obvious intention of becoming a major character, but only gets about five minutes an episode in which to get integrated into the show's ever-expanding universe, which isn't easy when he's shanking someone or relapsing on drugs on a weekly basis. Sure, Omar is blatantly overplayed by Wright, but it's not his fault--with Omar's limited and extremely busy screen time, nuance isn't exactly an option.

That this season works as well as it does is a testament to the core of characters who've been at its center from the beginning, along with a few newcomers who do manage to contribute something to show's harrowing, explosive approach. Even as Oz heads toward its home stretch, Tom Fontana still manages to find new dimensions to explore for his main characters and unfamiliar situations in which to put them. Sure, the show continues to drag out the Keller-Beecher affair and Ryan O'Reilly's (possibly) unrequited love for Doctor Nathan to diminishing returns, but in other cases we see familiar faces among both the inmates and staff undergoing profound changes in response to a variety of catalytic events. The staff undergoes some major shakeups as Warden Glynn starts to question his priorities in response to a new career opportunity and Emerald City chief Tim McManus slides deeper into depression and instability, but as always it's events among the inmates that take center stage, and to its credit the show is far from out of ideas when it comes to some of the major players behind bars. Kareem Said, especially, continues to emerge as one of the most complex and well-developed TV characters in history, played in memorably intense fashion by Eamonn Walker and imbued by the writing with a level of nuance that would be extremely difficult to bring to a Muslim character in the wake of 9/11. Said finds himself facing down a host of challenges to his ecumenical, non-violent worldview, none more prominent than a mid-season shocker that puts him on a sharp emotional spiral. For his part, it can be a little disorienting seeing a sadistic bigot and rapist like Schillinger studying scripture and eagerly awaiting the birth of his grandchild, but it does actually square with the pro-family, God-country-and-race message he's always propagated. Perhaps the best turn of the season other that Walker's, though, is submitted by Harold Perrineau as Augustus Hill, the wheelchair-bound lifer who serves as the show's narrator and often as its voice of reason. Hill has always been something of a moral center for the show, at least on the inmate side, and season four sees his character fleshed out a lot more fully than ever before as details about his past emerge and collide with some major developments in his present to produce an increasingly complete character in his own right.

Amidst the sea of new faces (many of whom quickly meet their ends), a few characters do also manage to survive long enough and get sufficient attention to become standouts as well. Anthony Chisholm is great as Burr Redding, a crafty, perpetually snarling drug lord hardened by a combination of Vietnam and the city streets he grew up on. Redding may be a vicious stone killer, but he's still got a logical moral code, and he's philosophical and introspective enough that I couldn't help but like him. His shrewd leadership ends up galvanizing Emerald City's black gangster elements for an ongoing war against the Latino faction led by the stylish and calculating Enrique Morales and the mafiosi under Chucky Pancamo, with predictably dramatic consequences for Em City's residents. Presaging the great work he would later do on HBO's incredibly brilliant The Wire, Lance Reddick does a powerful and intense turn as John Basil (aka Desmond Mobay), an undercover cop who goes into Emerald City with the best of intentions but quickly finds himself in over his head. Similarly, future Wire cast member Reg E. Cathey, easily one of the coolest actors hardly anybody has heard of, has a huge impact on the show in a relatively long arc as the charismatic Martin Querns, who replaces Tim as Em City's unit administrator and brings with him a hidden agenda that only serves to heighten Oz's already incendiary racial tensions. Shockingly enough, Luke Perry manages to make a similar impact on the show's dynamics as Jeremiah Cloutier, a larcenous ex-televangelist who comes in and makes some dramatic changes to Oz's spiritual order, at least to the extent that one exists.

In another welcome development, the show does make use of this season's larger allotment of episdoes to expand its focus beyond Emerald City, better living up to its title as it examines much more of its central institution. Continuing and expanding on a saga starting in season two, season four spends a great deal of time following the fortunes of creepy child-killer Shirley Bellinger and her new neighbors on death row. Despite the natural feeling of impending doom, there's still a somewhat lighthearted, darkly humorous feeling to the proceedings on death row, although that starts to subside as its residents meet their inevitable fates, albeit not always in a predictable fashion. The isolated cop wing, too, gets a couple of additions from the regular cast as the tragic story of the perpetually angry ex-correctional officer Clayton Hughes takes a series of turns for the worse.

Overall, while season four doesn't mark the best Oz has to offer, that certainly doesn't mean it's in any way without value. It takes a lot of risks, not all of which pan out, but it does at least demonstrate an admirable commitment to avoiding creative stasis as it approaches the beginning of its end, which is more than can be said for a lot of shows. And as usual, whatever else can be said about Oz, there's no denying its singular ferocity and almost total uniqueness. Despite some reservations, this season (and show) still gets a thumbs-up.