"I think he saw the value of that for his audience they had had great success on HBO with prison documentaries. "He was in the mood for a prison show," Fontana tells me.
However, for Chris Albrecht, it was something of a no-brainer. Twenty years ago, American television was largely restrained by the chaste, Tipper Gore–esque attitudes of middle America, so commissioning a show like OZ could have proved a risky move. There was no grand vision of the future of cable television-all I knew was this guy was gonna let me make this crazy prison show, and do it without any censorship." "The thought was that I was prescient," says Fontana, "which I've always said I wasn't. But it isn't just a format: The hour-long cable drama-coupled with the emergence of the DVD, capable of holding more shows per disc than a VHS, at a higher quality-created a new way of consuming television.
Since OZ first aired, the network's name has become synonymous with quality programming (with the exception of Entourage and Vinyl-nobody's perfect.) The shows it has produced-and still produce-have dominated conversations around the format it's credited with creating. These days, the idea of HBO picking up your show as a bad thing seems unfathomable. I was like 'Yay! This is gonna be great!' and all of my friends in the business were like, 'Why do you want to do a show on HBO? It's a movie channel, nobody watches it.' I said, 'Well yeah, but they're going to let me make the show I want to make, so I don't care if nobody watches it.' Like I said, it was a lonely place 20 years ago." "In fact, when I was pitching to Chris Albrecht, and he said he wanted to do OZ, I was exuberant. "They were showing features, buying libraries of movie studios," says Fontana. "We were sort of this lonely outpost on HBO," says Fontana, "because we were the first drama series on there, and back then, we were out there just doing what we thought was right-but we had no idea whether anyone would have any interest in it whatsoever."īefore Fontana took his idea to HBO, the cable network was just a vessel for movies.
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