Leo is the biggest of the big cheese at OZ, but this does not mean that he answers to no one.
After many years of experience working within the state prison system, Leo is in many ways as hardened as the convicts, and often acts as a foil to McManus' loftier ideas about prisoner rights. Convicted for vehicular manslaughter and multiple DUI's, Beecher knows what he's in for but has no idea what awaits him while he's in. Tobias Beecher is lightyears out of his element. We see a meek WASP type, pale from years of a desk job and wearing owlish glasses. When Groves is introduced to his inmate orientation partner, an elderly man named Rebadeaux, Groves licks the palm of Rebadeaux's hand. Groves has been convicted of killing, cutting up, and eating his parents.
We see a long-haired introvert with a beatific expression named Donald Groves. We see a young hispanic man named Alvarez, still dressed in his gang colors, fall to the floor when a shiv is driven into his chest. McManus believes that any prison inmate can be reformed, and created the Em City unit to provide inmates with opportunities to get an education, job skills, and find meaning and purpose for their interminable days (some for the rest of their natural lives) behind bars.Īs the camera pans around this state pen of society's human refuse, we see a group of new inmates on a narrow bench, waiting to be dictated the rules of their new home. Actually, with his mussed, balding pate, baseball cap, sneakers, and rumpled preppy clothes, McManus looks a little bit like Woody Allen himself, minus the nerdy glasses and incredibly annoying speech mannerisms.
#Oz series one movie#
Em City is the creation of Tim McManus, do-gooder, idealist and a man who dresses like a refugee from the Woody Allen movie "Annie Hall". The place: Emerald City, an experimental unit within the Oswald State Maximum Security Penitentiary.