"Don't pay any attention to the man behind the curtain!"
The cable television program is from the same people who produced Homicide: Life on the Street, and uses some of the same actors.
Set in the fictitious Oswald Maximum Security Prison (hence Oz) the majority of its actors are men. However a guard, and a doctor, are women.
There is certainly some violence--what television program today isn't. But I have found, even as Homicide, I am held to the machinations enmeshing prisoners, guards, administration, and the outside--in the form of the state governor (played by the good district attorney Danvers of Homicide, though here very bad)--and the lack of pretense, its pure nakedness.
And the theme music is about the best I have ever heard. (I hate it when they overdub the promo for the next program over it.)
Not for the faint of heart, to be sure, or those easily offended, but for the rest of us, an experience so often missing from drama.
It is an HBO--Home Box Office--production, and often touted as an example of what such entities can produce. The Sopranos is also an HBO production. | 
