HBO’s Brutal ‘OZ’ Not Entirely Captivating

“OZ,” a shocking HBO drama series about life in prison, commits a couple of capital crimes itself. There’s too much “Acting” with a capital A and too much “Writing” with a capital W. No wonder “OZ” has a capital Z.

If you like drama bold and bombastic, however, “OZ” certainly delivers. Life behind bars is no day at the beach or picnic in the park. It’s more a threatening, hellish ordeal. The intensity of “OZ” is unrelenting, and some of the scenes have a harrowing primal power.

“OZ” begins its second season on HBO on Monday. The pay-cable channel shows the episodes only at night because the program is filled with brutality both physical and verbal. It is strictly for adults, and for adults with thick skins at that. To return to the alphabet for a moment, if “OZ” were a movie, it would be rated R. At least.

The title has nothing to do with a certain wizard, and this Oz has no yellow brick road. “OZ” is short for Oswald Maximum Security Penitentiary, a vast prison in an unnamed state that contains a special experimental section called the Emerald City, or Em City for short. Here, prisoners have greater freedom to move about and control their lives than in other parts of the facility.

Things went a tad haywire in the first season, and the whole prison erupted in a riot in which two guards and six prisoners died. So as this season opens, there’s debate about whether to keep Em City in operation at all.

The names behind the show are very impressive. Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana are the executive producers, with Fontana dreaming up most of the story lines. Levinson is, of course, a famous and sometimes brilliant movie director (“Rain Man,” “Diner”) who previously teamed with Fontana to produce NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” a monumentally good and gritty cop show.

On HBO, they have much more freedom in both content and style. The content of Monday’s opener includes as ghastly a scene of sexual violence as has ever been filmed (for the record, there was a similar incident in a trash-movie classic called “I Spit on Your Grave”). The episode’s title, “The Tip,” turns out to be a very dark joke.

Everybody who sees it will be talking about it the next day.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the episode has to do with the aftermath of last season’s Attica-like riot. Guest star Charles Dutton plays Alvah Case, a law school dean who heads up a commission empowered by a corrupt creep of a governor to investigate the riot. Case learns one inmate was murdered during the ruckus, not killed in cross-fire as was assumed.

This matters a great deal to him but isn’t likely to fascinate the audience at home. Case stalks the prison interviewing suspects and witnesses. It’s a weak plot that isn’t likely to draw in new viewers. The cast, however, is top-heavy with talent, especially the versatile Ernie Hudson as the warden, Eamonn Walker as a bitter Muslim, B.D. Wong as the prison priest and Rita Moreno as the chief shrink.

Moreno is no longer the striking young singer-dancer of “West Side Story,” but age hasn’t made her less beautiful. It’s simply made her beautiful in a different way.

Em City looks surprisingly clean and futuristic, but what goes on among the inmates, who largely band together based on ethnic identities, isn’t pretty. Is “OZ” stark realism or just sensationalism? Sometimes it seems a weird, yet essentially conscientious mixture of both.

By far the most artsy parts are those in which a narrator who’s also a prisoner (Harold Perrineau) pops up to speak into the camera. He imparts such dubious wisdom as, “They say curiosity killed the cat, but what was the cat so curious about?” Hmm. They say the chicken crossed the road, but how do we know he wasn’t pushed?

“OZ” tries too hard, but sometimes it scores a shattering bull’s-eye.

* “OZ” is shown Mondays at 10 p.m. on HBO.