HBO's First Drama Broke A Lot Of Television Rules — This Might Be The Biggest

Even from a nearly three-decade distance, HBO's first one-hour drama, "Oz," feels unique. I've seen dozens of brilliant and groundbreaking HBO shows — OGs like "The Sopranos," "The Wire," or "Six Feet Under" — that kicked off after Tom Fontana's iconic prison drama, but "Oz" remains a singular piece of work that you can't shoehorn in with any other thematically similar cable drama. It's about vicious criminals, gangs, guards, and everything you normally see in a prison story, but it's in no way traditional. Fontana had no interest in making a conventional narrative or portraying stereotypical characters you've seen many times before. "Oz" was bold, confident, and experimental, and that already showed in its pilot.

As the creator recalled in an oral history published on Yahoo, Chris Albrecht (HBO's former CEO) asked him, "What's the one thing you're absolutely not allowed to do on broadcast television?" to which he said, "Kill the lead in the pilot." Then Albrecht urged him, "Well, then go ahead and do it." He did what he was told, and all this went down in 1997 when most television shows dared not defy such fundamental storytelling rules. So when it happened, it was kind of a shock (and still is to some degree) to the unsuspecting viewers who watched the pilot. This was just the first in a long line of rule-breaking that "Oz" did for six seasons between 1997 and 2003.

Before "Oz" premiered, it was promoted with Jon Seda's Dino Ortolani — an inmate convicted of murder, for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole — as the lead of the series. The pilot revolves around his character, telling his story and how he ended up in Oz, just to kill him off at the end of it, in a brutal, startling fashion. When Fontana hired Seda, he told him upfront that his character would have a pretty short life in the series, and he was "cool" with it, according to the creator. At the end of the pilot, Dino is getting lit up by another inmate and burns to death. Seda talked about how the whole experience was for him, saying:

"Talk about going out in a blaze of glory, right? It was pretty wild how it was shot. I remember seeing the dummy that they had made up in the makeup trailer, and I said, 'Oh my gosh, that dummy looks just like me!' When we were shooting it, I remember just looking up and telling Tim [McAdams], 'Hey, hey, hey, don't actually light it.' A couple times, he kept forgetting and actually lit it. I'm like, 'Wait! You're going to drop this on my face, dummy!'

Fontana was also the uncredited co-creator alongside James Yoshimura on the hit cop drama "Homicide: Life on the Street," which ran on NBC for seven seasons between 1993 and 1999. So, as compensation for his brief but memorable part in "Oz," he cast Seda in the last 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 got to be in two of the most influential and highly-regarded crime dramas of the '90s after all.