Dean Winters

In Oz (1997), Dean Winters makes a manipulative prisoner absorbing company. His Ryan O'Reily holds our attention through a prison drama that can be punishing, and not always for good reason. We felt uneasy about enjoying his company so much, because that watchability risks making the brutality part of the attraction. It is a substantial performance in a series we recommend, with reservations about an appetite for excess that becomes harder to defend.

Tom Fontana wrote O'Reily specifically for Winters, and the part gives his mixture of menace and vulnerability room to work. An abrasive character needs something beyond abrasiveness if we are to keep following him. J.K. Simmons gives Vernon Schillinger an appalling certainty; Winters is another reason the ensemble rewards attention wherever it falls. The surrounding conflicts between prisoners and staff keep the programme concerned with how the prison works and whose interests its rules serve. That context matters when the acting makes such difficult company so absorbing.

The later television work put that abrasiveness to different uses, from Johnny Gavin, an NYPD detective in Rescue Me (2004), to Dennis Duffy, Liz Lemon's sleazy ex-boyfriend in 30 Rock (2006). Duffy brought the deadpan delivery and comic timing to the foreground. Comedy suits an actor who can hold our interest without asking us to like the man. These recurring parts are central to a career that has continued through television guest roles and supporting work in films.

The reservation is how readily cops, criminals and ex-boyfriends can become a casting habit; Winters has been asked to play plenty of them. There is more to him than a reliable supply of unpleasantness, as O'Reily makes clear. We would welcome another part that gives the vulnerability as much room as the menace. Another generic hard case can surely wait.