“Oz” (6 Seasons, 1997-2003)
Though overshadowed by “The Sopranos” and “The Wire,” “Oz,” the network’s first hour-long drama, is essentially patient zero for the pay-cable drama as we know it. Without it, shows like “Breaking Bad” and “Sons Of Anarchy” on rival networks, and yes, “Game Of Thrones,” might not have existed at all. Created by Tom Fontana, best known for his work on “Homicide: Life On The Street,” and who had a writing credit on every one of the show’s episodes, it’s set in the Oswald State Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in which an idealistic manager has set up a unit called Emerald City, a controlled, experimental place with glass walls intended to show that even the most dangerous prisoners can be rehabilitated. It’s safe to say that the experiment doesn’t work. More than fifteen years since it started to air, it remains something of a high watermark for brutality on television, with rape, racism, death-by-fire and worse all on the cards from the off, and things only getting more grotesque from there. The pioneer of the kind of expansive cast that would come down the line, with early roles from notable TV figures like Christopher Meloni, Harold Perrineau, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Dean Winters and Edie Falco, there is still a strange humanism to the show. No matter how monstrous the characters get (and they are particularly monstrous, given that a large number of them are Aryan Brotherhood members, and the most obviously sympathetic character is Lee Tergesen‘s Beecher, an alcoholic who drunkenly ran over a child), there’s a kind of compassion towards all of them, with the twisted romance between Beecher and Meloni’s bisexual serial killer being a curiously tender example. Given what’s come since, it doesn’t quite stand up as the finest example of the genre. The realistic docu-drama style borrowed from “Homicide” jars awkwardly with the absurd Grand Guignol melodrama of the plotting, and the semi-poetic narration by Perrineau’s wheelchair-bound inmate often grates. But there’s still an enormous amount of compelling drama to be found here, and if nothing else, the way it pioneered making sympathetic figures out of those who’d be villains elsewhere can be reflected all the way through to “Game Of Thrones.”
“Sex And The City” (6 Seasons, 1998-2004)
“Oz” was the show that got its foot in the door, but “Sex & The City” was the one that kicked it wide open. It was the first HBO show to really take over pop culture in the way that was restricted to network shows before that point (“The Larry Sanders Show,” which SATC essentially succeeded, came closest, but was always more of a critics’ favorite, its highest ratings a full seven million lower than its successor). Darren Star and Michael Patrick King‘s show, adapted from Candace Bushnell‘s book, essentially shaped a generation of women (and many men), making Cosmos the hottest drink around and putting Jimmy Choo on everyone’s shopping list. It’s harder to remember having been tarnished by the two increasingly awful movies, but the show itself, which revolved around narrator Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker), the sexually confident Samantha (Kim Cattrall), uptight, preppy Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and careerist Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), was also very good for the most part; sharp and funny and, most importantly of all, sexually frank. “Oz” hadn’t shied from sexuality, but that show’s sexuality mostly revolved around prison rape. Here, though, as you might have imagined from the title, was a show that had sex at its very center, and in a more explicit and honest sense than had ever really been shown on TV, and particularly bold in making its older character, Samantha, the most unabashed and upfront about her sexuality. Obviously, Lena Dunham‘s “Girls” is the more obvious successor to the show, but sex is just as crucial to “Game Of Thrones” as the violence. Sometimes—often, even—it’s gratuitous and titillating, not least with the “sexposition” it pioneered (livening up lengthy backstory monologues by having an orgy in the background), but it also uses fucking to tell a story or reveal character in a refreshingly adult way, and that’s something that Carrie and her gang led the way towards.
“The Sopranos” (6 Seasons, 1999-2007)
Together with “Sex And The City,” “The Sopranos” put HBO on the map as a home for original television as one of the most acclaimed and lauded shows in the history of the medium, and until a couple of weeks ago, the most popular series in the pay-cable network’s history (the average audience for “Game Of Thrones” is now over 18.4 million people, beating the 18.2 million that ‘Sopranos’ got at its peak). “The Sopranos” came from modest beginnings though. It debuted from creator, David Chase, whose previous credits included the beloved “Northern Exposure,” but whose sole previously created series, “Almost Grown,” had lasted only ten episodes a decade earlier. It featured a cast, led by James Gandolfini and also included Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli and Lorraine Bracco, who would mostly only be familiar to those with an encyclopedic knowledge of character actors in crime movies. And it’s central premise—of a mobster who goes into therapy—was shared by a big studio comedy, the Robert De Niro/Billy Crystal vehicle “Analyze This,” that landed at almost exactly the same time, and threatened to overshadow it. Instead, it was the other way around, the plaudits for the series, and its eventual huge commercial success, stealing the admittedly successful film’s thunder, and paving the way for the endless and idiotic “is TV better than the movies” debate that pops up every so often these days, and which “Game Of Thrones” adds further fuel to the fire of. Ironically, Chase comes down firmly on the side of the movies, admitting that he basically doesn’t watch TV, and originally conceiving of “The Sopranos” as a film. We’re grateful it was stretched out, though as the deceptively tight plotting melded with a character study of an often monstrous, always human anti-hero, creating the template that so many continue to emulate today. The show proved to be appointment viewing in the same way that “Game Of Thrones” still is today, and like “Oz,” proved that a mass audience could deal with stomach-churning violence and creatively foul language without shying away. But perhaps more importantly, it was just terrific, with a caliber of writing and direction that could compete with not just anything else on the air, but anything in theaters too, and it’s telling that some of the show’s most prolific writers went on to continue the cable drama revolution, like “Boardwalk Empire” showrunner Terence Winter and “Mad Men” creator Matthew Weiner. And two of the show’s most frequent directors, Timothy Van Patten and Alan Taylor, were crucial in establishing “Game Of Thrones” (Van Patten, who helmed twenty episodes of “The Sopranos,” directed the second iteration of the “Game Of Thrones” pilot after HBO ordered significant reshoots on the original one, initially helmed by Thomas McCarthy).
