Robert Preston's Cloudburst, Joe Scarborough's Alarms

If Oz was the first serial prison drama on HBO, there are a few scenes in the early episodes which seem too convenient, or gratuitous. The elimination of the Schibetta’s without much pushback from the families who once ran New York, while clever, smacks more of an Agatha Christie murder mystery than any real life crime syndicate. The godfathers weren’t that stupid, nor so blind as to not be able to put two and two together, even if their power was on the wane at the time Fontana created the show. Walker’s Said rejection of Governor Devlin’s clemency is too  strident, regardless of what sociology teaches about recidivism. If Kareem had been a real life figure the Catholic Church itself might have been hard pressed not to nominate the man for sainthood. His entire character arc is passive aggressive martyrdom, riot and fundamental flaws in justice aside; and though one might ask why a lawyer guilty of vehicular homicide would be placed in Oz, while acknowledging that rape and physical torture desensitize, Beecher’s slasher killing of the relatively civil Nazi Metizer strains credulity, just as Alvarez blinding Officer Rivera is medieval barbarity, even for a hard time facility. That type of mutilation, goaded into or not, falls into the category of sensational gore on display for shock value. Fontana doesn’t know what to do with the character after the graphic reverberation of the assault, and it can be considered a failed story line upon which Krauthammer’s “blame the culture” mantra may be duly aimed, spilling right into the Dick Wolf universe like a stream out of time continuum, a prelude to hard boiled Baked Apple.

Although I was aware of Meloni being in the cast when I put the first season on my watch list, I had no idea I would be playing musical chairs with eighteen years of Law & Order spin offs. Barring the majority of Wolf’s big guns, every Law & Order recur is there, like a revolving door from cable’s seepage into network, Erbe the delusional child killer marinating into Kathryn Erbe street wise sidekick, Simmons the Aryan potbelly to Simmons the urbane criminal analyst. Eamonn Walker, even Edie Falco, let alone that Meloni is barely credible as Keller. Yet I did a partial run through to season three to remind myself how miserable progressive outrage marred my life, stark inner city, sterile public housing, so much calamity, now fighting and failing and wasting every medically subsidized dollar into an acute ulcer, or a bad case of heartburn. I was never vain about much, but my long hair is ugly silver, matted beyond decency, an owl’s nest, with ill trained Africans driving me insane, all due to poorly rationed technology. Even my attempt to hang tough for the sake of my published work seems a dismal exercise, amidst a streaming glut which hasn’t proven itself a healthy anchorage. Austin Petersen had a couple of interesting tweets about big corporate which made me think it is no longer such a sharp divide, Marxist to free market models, but my big event this morning is rolling my torso on the hospital bed by myself. I’d like to torch it.

One That Got Away

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was produced while the Zodiac killings were still under active investigation, approximately 400 miles away. The documentary drama came of age in the decade of my childhood, although I did not know anything of Pierce’s work until very recently, when ThisTV purchased syndication and ran it in their cyclic fashion. While the trombone sequence can be considered signatory for the seventies idea of graphic exploitation, my concern with the film is less critical, and more symmetrical, to allude to Brian Greene’s reminder about the past and present, in physics. The 07 Zodiac has an uncanny familial reflection when compared to Pierce’s more primitive lampoon. Like The Onion Field, Zodiac elevates the focus of the true crime genre, and raises questions about justice and equity. If we wind up haunted by the heinous whom we never apprehend, the penal systems we have for those criminals proven guilty seems to be little more than an existential boomerang. Wambaugh brackets his film between the explosive annihilation of a good man with a strong center juxtaposed against an abscess of judicial process for his impulsive villains, and Fontana and Levinson,  in Oz, bind all together in manipulative culpability, while the EU confinement centers virtually dispense with the concept of punishment. Oz is a good series, but it gets bogged down by too much emphasis on "the rats in the maze," investigations with no repercussions, death sentences with no proportionality. Murderers, however, are the most distinctive of group subsets, marked by an irrevocable violation against the group, to the point that even our more aggressive primates are impacted. Apes may be more in the moment than some, but when they conspire to kill they know they've stressed the bonds that bind the families under the alpha leaders.