Orange Is The New Black

Right, what’s the Netflixiest show you can possibly think of?  Chances are, whether or not you have the streaming service in your home, nagging away at you until it chains you hopelessly to the sofa, that Orange Is The New Black is near the top of that list.  Sure, there’s House Of Cards, and you’ve got Stranger Things.  You might even love the often-overlooked The Get Down (I do).  But Netflix’s most watched original series is that one with orange jumpsuits about some women in a prison or something along those lines.  I can hardly become some sort of boxset streaming guru, then, if I haven’t watched this one.  So, a few months back, I took myself down to Litchfield Penitentiary and freely surrendered my viewing liberty to the minimum-security women’s prison there.  I’m now out the other side, six series down, with a seventh and final season due in 2019.  I’ve never been in a real prison, but I loved every minute of this one.

I’ve wanged on before about certain things that make human drama that extra bit tenser – I’m calling these my trigger themes.  You know, things like having a zombie apocalypse as a backdrop as in The Walking Dead, which means your favourite characters can die at any minute.  Or setting things in a dystopian future, like the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale.  All along, I’d forgotten that prison was one of the best trigger themes ever given to a drama series.  You’ve got the artificial and unnatural environment of cells and wings, an entrenched division of characters into prisoners, guards and those left behind, and the heightened stakes that come when prisoners dream of their freedom.  Orange Is The New Black has all of this and a load more stuff you won’t be expecting.  I was hooked in from episode one and happily threw the key away until I had watched every instalment.

Everything is packaged up for your middle-class sensitivities, as we enter the world of the prison through the eyes Piper Chapman, an educated New Yorker with a wealthy background who is self-surrendering on drugs charges trawled up from a misspent youth.  She wrinkles her nose at the showers, accidentally insults the food to the main chef and expects the guards to be reasonable when it comes to listening to her many complaints.  Piper is a good in to the prison world, but in later series she ends up being one of the least interesting things about it.  Once her fiancé, best friend and parents fall away, the show no longer needs its blonde, white leading lady.  Litchfield is divided racially into prison families: Hispanic, black and white, with a splinter group shooting off the whites for the methheads, who you can identify from their bad teeth.  While racial tension shouldn’t be boiled down to a plot device for our own entertainment, Orange Is The New Black simply reflects a prison predisposition for inmates to categorise themselves in this way, like the segregation discussion in Dear White People.

What’s surprising is the limited interaction between these groups.  Some of the cast go for series only having scenes with their own prison families.  While the main white family (finally) embraces Piper under the matriarchal protection of fiery Red, you’ll want to hang out in the black family for bigger belly laughs, or in the Latina family for the wittiest bilingual dialogue.  I found myself getting excited every time a scene began for the Latina characters, especially if my favourite Litchfielder of all was there: Mendoza.  Played by Selenis Leyva (who, like all the cast, is unrecognisable in her IMDB headshot), Gloria Mendoza is capable of a wonderful combination of bad-assery, smart-mouthery, mother-hennery and unadulterated sass that my main feedback would have been to make the whole damn thing about her (and maybe Aleida).  She could push Piper down the stairs just by glaring at her (fingers crossed for season seven).  Next time you’re doing housework, imagine her shouting at you and see if you don’t get the job done in half the time.

Let’s run through how six series’ worth of content can be extracted from just one place and yet remain darkly comic and deeply dramatic (the show, that is, not what I’ve written about it; though, maybe…):

Season one

This is our Philosopher’s Stone to Litchfield’s underfunded and corrupt Hogwarts.  Piper walks stubbornly and headfirst into all sorts of unnecessary drama.  Keep an eye out for, basically, everyone, as even that incidental crazy hairy lady in the cubicle becomes a pivotal character over time.  Back on planet Piper, though, where we are forced to go, she realises the ex-lover who got her in the drugs trouble in the first place, Alex, is locked in with her.  Cue LOLs as Piper insists she is engaged to a man (Jason Biggs in various sweaters).  A dramatic arc around naughty guard Mendez supplying drugs to addicts and supplying his tool to other inmates in broom cupboards culminates in a sort-of Christmas special with surprising singing...  In all of this, you find charm and humour, but you’re first exposed to the harsh reality of the show’s treatment of its characters – they are never more than a hair’s breadth from a life of disaster.

Season two

Thinking you’ve got used to things, the first episode disorientates you horribly, as we follow a bewildered Piper around what seems like the whole federal prison system – truly grim.  Back at Litchfield, a new villain, the slimy Vee, is back behind bars, stirring up old tensions and manipulating the black family to grim effect.  We pootle through a lot of the other surrounding characters, but the finale serves up perfect justice.

Season three

Throughout this series, Litchfield is threatened with closure until a private firm buys up the operation.  Conditions deteriorate before and after and the inmates’ growing frustration is palpable.  Piper (oh god, it’s all about her) grows into a role as a bit of a hardass, taking advantage of the prison knicker-sewing industry to set up a little enterprise for herself, despite good friend Nicky Nichols (the wild Natasha Lyonne) getting carted off to max unjustly.

Season four

MCC, the new private owners of Litchfield, double inmate numbers, with bunkbeds being the only infrastructure adjustment.  This brings in a host of new characters, all while we’re still uncovering those that have been there the whole time, such as the Dominican faction and the older ladies.  Litchfield also gets its first celebrity inmate, but, overall, the new guards are too inexperienced and feckless to ensure prisoner safety.  All hell breaks loose.

Season five

This whole series revolves around a riot that bursts out in response to the guard brutality that will cost you one of your favourite characters.  While some prisoners run amok, others stay out of trouble.  Highlights include the emergence of coffee shop culture in the midst of chaos, and the unveiling of the library memorial.  Throughout, you’ll wish the cast dearest to you would behave, as you fear their future punishment and resent how they dehumanise themselves with their behaviour.  Worse still, the riot negotiations constantly dangle a satisfactory conclusion that remains frustratingly out of reach.

Season six

The action moves to maximum security and a whole host of characters never seem to return.  You really miss them, but D and C block are bursting with feisty new ladies (and guards) to help with the loss.  Every riot action, it seems, comes with its consequence, but injustice seems to be the overall response.  A kickball game promises to see a lifelong grudge between two sisters (Carol and Barb) erupt into bloodshed, but it’s the way the prisoners are forced to betray each other that will cause the most pain.

There, you’re all prepared for the journey.  A lot of folk have abandoned Orange Is The New Black midway through a series for its slower pace, but, on reflection, each season does seem to set up, ramp down, and then crescendo perfectly in its thirteen-episode arc.  It’s ruthless with removing characters, but each addition is worth their weight in orange jumpsuit.  Like Lost, each character’s pre-prison life is fleshed out with flashbacks, with one dominating each episode.  My only frustration here is that some of the best ladies never got theirs.  Methhead Angie, like many, comes from the periphery to the fore over the show’s run, but we never find out how she got such bad teeth and why she is constantly a vile mix of naivety, foolishness and sinister selfishness.  Gina, often called the squirrel lady, is another inmate whose crimes I’d love to have seen unpacked.  And finally, Maritza, a Latina whose lines are almost as good as Mendoza’s, is just crying out for more explanation.  Luckily, her story finally does get fleshed out, but I was worried for a long time that it wouldn’t.

Either way, for me, the star of the show becomes Taystee.  At first, she seems like a side-serving of comic relief, but her warmth and conflict is a magnetic force on viewers.  It’s in the riot that she really comes into her own, bringing Caputo onside in a way that proves he is a good man (beer can or not).  While Piper ultimately skips through her Litchfield journey relatively unscathed (minus some teeth chipping, a shit tattoo and some involuntary burning), Taystee is set up to shoulder an ultimate injustice that would be all the more alarming if it didn’t feel so realistic.  I said I loved every minute of Orange Is The New Black, but that can’t be true.  Taystee’s story is not one you can enjoy, but it’s one that everyone needs to see.