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The roughly four-minute sketch shows the opening credits for the HBO series with clips of Jerry mixed in doing various activities around the prison. On an episode of Saturday Night Live that Jerry Seinfeld hosted on October 2, 1999, a sketch was produced that showed what life was like for his character of the same name behind bars after being transferred to the Oswald State Correctional Facility sometime after the events of Seinfeld (1989–1998). Oz took advantage of the freedoms of premium cable to show elements of coarse language, drug use, violence, frontal nudity, homosexuality, and male rape, as well as ethnic and religious conflicts that would have been unacceptable to traditional advertiser-supported American broadcast television. Guest actors are listed in the show's end credits.
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Main actors are credited as "starring" in the opening title sequence, while supporting actors are listed under "also starring". Main article: List of Oz (TV series) characters In contrast to the dangerous criminals, central character Tobias Beecher gives a look at a usually law-abiding man who made one fatal drunk-driving mistake.
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There are the African-American Homeboys (Wangler, Redding, Poet, Keane, Adebisi) and Muslims (Said, Arif, Khan), the Wiseguys (Pancamo, Nappa, Schibetta, Zanghi, Urbano), the Aryan Brotherhood (Schillinger, Robson, Mack), the Latinos of El Norte (Alvarez, Morales, Guerra, Hernandez), the Irish (The O'Reilly brothers, Kirk, Keenan), the Gays (Hanlon, Cramer, Ginzburg), the Bikers (Hoyt, Sands, Burns), the Christians (Cloutier, Coushaine, Cudney) and many other individuals not completely affiliated with one particular group (Rebadow, Busmalis, Keller, Stanislofsky).
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There are many groups of inmates throughout the show, and not everyone within each group survives the show's events. Oz chronicles McManus' attempts to keep control over the inmates of Em City. The show's narrator, inmate Augustus Hill, explains the show, and provides context, thematic analysis, and a sense of humor. Others, corrections officers and inmates alike, simply want to survive, some long enough to make parole and others just to see the next day. Some fight for power – either over the drug trade or over other inmate factions and individuals. Under McManus and Warden Leo Glynn, all inmates in "Em City" struggle to fulfill their own needs. However, almost all of these factions are constantly at war with one another which often results in many prisoners being beaten, raped, or killed. Emerald City is an extremely controlled environment, with a carefully managed balance of members from each racial and social group, intended to ease tensions among these various factions. In this experimental unit of the prison, unit manager Tim McManus emphasizes rehabilitation and learning responsibility during incarceration, rather than carrying out purely punitive measures. The majority of Oz 's story arcs are set in " Emerald City", named for a setting from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Frank Baum's Oz books, first described in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Moreover, most of the series' story arcs are set in " Emerald City", a wing named after a setting from the fictional Land of Oz in L. The nickname "Oz" is also a reference to the classic film The Wizard of Oz (1939), which popularized the phrase, "There's no place like home." In contrast, a poster for the series uses the tagline: "It's no place like home". "Oz" is the nickname for the Oswald State Correctional Facility, formerly Oswald State Penitentiary, a fictional level 4 maximum-security state prison.
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