Before ‘The Sopranos’ came HBO’s boundary-shattering prison drama ‘Oz’

Harold Perrineau in HBO's "Oz."HBO

This week in Autopilot, a Globe series on great first television episodes:

“Oz”

Episode: “The Routine”

Pilot air date: July 12, 1997, HBO

Stream it on: HBO Max, Prime Video

Conventional wisdom holds that “The Sopranos” started the TV revolution on HBO in 1999, ushering in an era of novelistic storytelling and shattering content restrictions. This is true to some extent. But the series that paved the way for Tony and Co. actually arrived two years earlier. It was much darker, even nihilistic, and it made viewers of the time ask a collective question: Can they do this on TV?

There had never been anything like “Oz,” the shudder-inducing prison drama that premiered in 1997 and somehow lasted six seasons. The “somehow” is not because “Oz” wasn’t great television; at its best it certainly was. Perhaps more important, the series showed how a creator with guts and vision — in this case, showrunner Tom Fontana — could blow the doors of TV off their hinges at HBO. “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” and other favorites then walked through those doors and earned deserved glory.

The pilot episode, “The Routine,” set the stakes and smeared them with blood. A wheelchair-bound narrator, Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau), lays it out for us: “Oz is where I live. Oz is where I’ll die, where most of us will die. What we were don’t matter. What we are don’t matter. What we become don’t matter. Does it?” We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore. Oz is short for Oswald State Penitentiary; within its walls sits Emerald City, an experimental unit run by reform-minded Tim McManus (Terry Kinney). He wants the worst of the worst to mingle and rehabilitate. Instead they break off into factions — Black Muslim, Aryan Nation, drug dealers, wise guys — and go to war, psychological and literal.

The moment in the pilot that convinced me “Oz” was a different kind of prison show comes after the seemingly paternal Vern Schillinger (future Oscar winner and “Spider-Man” movie mainstay J.K. Simmons) befriends a mild-mannered lawyer, in for vehicular manslaughter, named Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen). Vern gets Tobias away from the inmate who’s been menacing him and makes the lawyer his new cellmate. Then he forcibly and painfully tattoos a swastika onto his roomie’s rear end. In other words, he brands him.

Fontana had already reinvented the police procedural (along with David Simon and others) with “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which ran on NBC from 1993 to 1999 and brought a level of gritty detail and character development new to the genre. “Oz” showed what he could do when he didn’t have to worry about advertisers. And yet in one crucial regard the series was a throwback to earlier portrayals of life in prison and other institutions. Like other touchstones of the genre, it thrived on the idea that life on the inside reflects the factionalism and resentments of the general population — that is, the real world. A bleak world view? Perhaps. Then again, revolutions are rarely pretty.