OZ

We've been borrowing DVD's of OZ from a friend and watching them in order - we had never seen the show before, had never even heard of it not getting HBO. It was canceled/ended years ago now.
If you'e never seen it, it's pretty impressive as HBO shows go. Mesmerizing at first because its HBO and they can show full frontal nudity, guys groping, soft core...so yeah, it has THAT going for it, plus some really spectacular violence and language. But if that doesn't turn you off either for its baseness or for it's obvious shock value, there's quite a bit more to appreciate: some very good acting despite some of the implausible plot lines given to the actors here and there, social, political, spiritual commentary, some facts you might not hear anywhere else, some ideas you don't often get from tv, despicable characters that you can't help but love, and lovable characters you have to reject.
Created by Tom Fontana..whoever he is he is also responsible for St. Elsewhere and a bunch of other canceled shows. The casting in this show is interesting. TV actors they swing from show to show like 2 dollar whores, and you'll catch lots of people from Dexter, another HBO show (but with less cock and more boobs) and also Lost in the Oz credits, but it's more the less well known people that interest me.
Take Reg Cathey. He played the head of Emerald City in a handful of episodes. Oz and Emerald City are the only two obvious Wizard of references in the show that I've noticed...and yet perhaps not. Its really easy to forget the comparatively downy Wizard of Oz when watching this show. There's no Wizard, there's no yellow brick road, and so when I was watching this guy Reg, I wasn't thinking about it at all, and you can call it a subconscious mind trick, but I didn't put the two together. Reg looks like the Cowardly Lion. Something about his bright eyes and spiky eyelashes, tall brow, long face, and as Querns, he has a helmet of hair over his head connected to a thin beard which is in effect a short mane around his face. I can only assume his casting was deliberate.
They also seem to take the actors' appearances highly into consideration in the cases of many other actors, the O'Reilly brothers are played by and actual pair of Irish brothers. Actors cast as family members actually look enough alike to be believable.
The cast also has a revolving door. While there is a core cast that stays around the whole show, each one seems to disappear for one reason or another for a few episodes at a time and then comes back, and in between, scores of secondary characters come in and then leave again, mostly because they get shanked of course.
Most of the conditions at Oz, the murders, one a week or so, the metal box with a bucket that serves as solitary confinement in which they throw you naked with nothing else, the fact that a guy can rape a woman, be thrown into prison a week later in the same prison where the woman he raped works along whit the prisoner who killed her husband and claims to love her...it's all a little too much to believe, a little exaggerated for the sake of the story, but I find myself ignoring it, and perhaps allowing myself to enjoy it because of that small layer of insulation whereas I don't think I could enjoy it if it were any realer.