There's No Place Like Oz: HBO and Quality Television

Steven Alan Carr, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Communication

Indiana University - Purdue University Fort Wayne

More than 15 years have passed since the British Film Institute published MTM: "Quality Television. During this time, the American television industry has undergone a series of radical transformations. Where so-called quality demographics drove the output of the MTM Enterprises, producing such sitcoms as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the innovative police drama Hill Street Blues, the explosion of satellite and cable technology has fueled the growth of made-for-cable series.

Given the radical shifts that have forced a reassessment of the very concept of broadcasting, this paper proposes to re-examine the notion of quality television amid a different communication landscape from the 1980s. In particular, the HBO drama Oz demonstrates the necessity of redefining quality television in light of the made-for-cable television series.

The overall mass media landscape has changed considerably since the mid-1980s. Once accounting for nearly 95 % of television households, network television attracts less than 50 % of the same audience as of 1999. If one views this audience as the product and advertisers as customers, having to provide only half of a commodity has had a devastating effect upon the revenues of ABC, CBS and NBC. In addition, both the Federal Communication Commission and the Justice Department historically have curtailed network television from either producing their own shows or owning a financial interest in the shows aired over a network.

Traditionally, network television has responded to these constraints by paying independent program producers less than actual production costs. A network typically pays a license fee of about 80% of production costs. This fee guarantees the network the right to air a show twice. A program producer then must rely on off-network syndication to make back the remaining costs – if the show lasts a season and the network orders more episodes. Since syndication requires that a show have enough episodes in its library to syndicate, most series lose money for their producers because the network either cancels mid-season or fails to renew for another season. Conversely, relatively rare long-running hits – All in the Family, Mary Tyler Moore, M*A*S*H*, Cosby, Seinfeld – can help subsidize the losses incurred from these shows’ less successful siblings.

Ratings have typically determined the fate of a show, although both networks and advertisers have increasingly scrutinized not just how many households watch a given show, but who watches and how much disposable income these households have. By the early 1970s, the networks had begun to build schedules around these so-called quality demographics. CBS had replaced its barnyard comedies – The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and Green Acres – at the height of their popularity. Much to its chagrin, the network found its audience skewing toward a more rural and elderly population. The ensuing shift toward relevant programming on CBS with programs such as Mary Tyler Moore and All in the Family marked an economic decision intended to capture the more lucrative 18-49 audience.

Based on its successes – eventually with Mary Tyler Moore in syndication – MTM Enterprises emerged as a powerhouse player in providing the networks with quality program content. MTM built its reputation on providing Quality Television – socially relevant shows retaining the look of film which could also make money by drawing desirable audiences. Conventional wisdom held that quality demographics would eventually lead to bigger ratings. When NBC ordered shows like the innovative police drama Hill Street Blues and the topical medical drama St. Elsewhere from MTM, the network frequently made public reference to the importance of allowing these shows to take root with an audience.

With the rise of cable and satellite technology, especially during the 80s, the television landscape changed significantly. In particular, cable channels like Home Box Office provided an entirely different financing model to the network’s sponsor-driven paradigm. Rather than subsidize programming with advertising dollars, HBO charges cable providers $4-6 per subscriber. The cable provider in turn charges $10 or more for the premium channel. While networks continued to use AT&T’s microwave transmission well into the 80s, Time Warner capitalized upon satellite technology to distribute HBO to its own cable systems, as well as competing ones.

Given this new media environment, networks can once again produce their own programming and retain financial interest in syndication since the mid-1990s. Lifting the financial interest and syndication rules, however, has given rise to an ever-shrinking oligopoly of media conglomerates such as Time Warner. While network sponsorship – as the book MTM: “Quality Television” certainly demonstrates – often could work at odds with Quality Television, HBO’s original programming raises some new questions for cable. For example, does Quality Television and its quality demographics now belong only to those who can afford the quality premium charged by the cable operator? Does the premium subsidizing HBO’s costs sufficiently insulate its original programming from its parent company, Time Warner? Is this system a significant improvement over the sponsor-driven network model? According the characteristics of Quality Television which the book MTM: “Quality Television” delineates, the HBO series Oz remains in keeping with the attributes of other MTM shows. However, with the increasing fragmentation of the television audience, the concept of what constitutes quality requires some ideological re-examination.

The remainder of this paper will discuss the way in which Oz appears to continue the MTM tradition of quality. First, one should note that Tom Fontana, the creative force behind Oz, served as one of the writers for MTM’s St. Elsewhere in the 80s. The two shows remain very different from one another, but they do share some key attributes. Like other MTM shows – especially Lou Grant, Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere – Oz attempts a high degree of social relevance. Much of television arguably functions as socially relevant, but the way in which Oz positions itself as socially relevant remains distinctive. A second and related attribute, Oz attempts to position itself as a different kind of television. This difference serves as a hallmark to its self-professed quality. Finally, Oz relies heavily on character development and the ensemble cast to differentiate its text.

Set in an experimental ward of a maximum security prison, Oz announces itself as a socially conscious prison drama. However, like Hill Street Blues, the show shies away from an overtly political stance. Instead, its touts its relevance in terms of its construction of realism. The show and its creative personnel articulate this realism, mostly through images of graphic violence and adult themes. When asked if Oz glorifies prison life, Fontana asserts a realist aesthetic of violence:

I don't believe in violence for violence's sake. The violence on OZ is choreographed specifically to reflect how harsh and horrible violence is. I would hope nobody sits there and enjoys the violence. This is real violence. Violence is horrifying and it should be avoided at all costs.

At the same time, Oz bears a similarity to other MTM shows in how it integrates social relevance. Each of its episodes brings its relevance down to a very personal level. Medical cost-cutting, male breast cancer, media manipulation and corrupt politics have all featured prominently in Oz. In keeping with the MTM tradition, the show does not offer an overt ideological stance on these issues. Rather, the show presents how these issues affect the lives of individual prisoners. According to Fontana, many of the storylines he writes come not from prison but in what he calls everyday life.

The series sets itself apart from typical television both in terms of its film look as well as the innovation and artistic freedom it attempts to foster. Filmmaker Barry Levinson works with Fontana in putting together the series. Directors shoot the project in single-camera film style, as opposed to the multiple camera set-up used for most situation comedies. Shooting on film stock is not necessarily new, but using it – as Mary Tyler Moore did - to differentiate MTM’s product does remain a hallmark of Quality Television.

In interviews, the cast and creative personnel frequently cite how the working environment encourages innovation and artistic freedom. Within the limits of corporate sponsorship, MTM shows like Lou Grant and Hill Street Blues tried to encourage similar innovation. Minus a network standards and practices department, Oz retains freedoms that no MTM show ever had. The series encourages innovation among its guest directors. Fontana keeps the series consistent by overseeing the editing process.

Although Oz features graphic violence, it retains the same attention to character-driven narratives that remained a crucial hallmark of MTM series. Like those series, Oz employs an ensemble cast – no one character retains more importance than another. Unlike prior MTM series, however, Oz features no particularly likable anchor with which to identify. In this way, Oz’ comic analogue may be the MTM-like Buffalo Bill anti-situation comedy.

Nonetheless, Oz retains the typical features of other MTM hour long series, which employ multiple story lines within each episode detailing character development taking place over a series of narrative arcs. Unlike the self-contained hour long drama, Oz’ characters evolve over multiple episodes. Much of the show’s run features the violent descent of Tobias Beecher, an ex-lawyer who must adapt to survive in Oz. In the second season of the show, Simon Adebisi, a particularly vicious prison inmate, finds interim redemption once he encounters an African healer in the ward. When the other inmates murder the healer, Adebisi has a nervous breakdown. By the third season, however, Adebisi has returned to tormenting his fellow inmates.

Although Oz emphasizes the horror and brutality of prison life, in its own way it propels the MTM trope of the domesticated workplace. Just as other MTM series emphasize the family-like structure emerging in places of employment, Oz has its own admittedly dysfunctional domestic structure working in prison. The conceit of the show – an experimental ward where prisoners run their own day to day operations – echoes MTM’s other ensemble dramas.

In this paper, I’ve tried to sketch out some of the ways in which Oz continues the MTM series legacy, given the current changes in the United States television landscape. If HBO remains the heir apparent to Quality Television – particularly with other shows like The Sopranos and Sex and the City – one must not consider such quality out of ideological context. One must consider the social relevance of Oz and these other shows in terms of the conditions of their distribution. If these shows continue to rework and redefine the representation of family, they do so with an unprecedented, economically select audience able to help underwrite the costs of innovation and quality.