Moderator: JRibeiro
Trailer:Orange Is the New Black revolves around Piper Chapman (Schilling), a New York woman, who is sent to a women's federal prison for possessing a suitcase full of drug money for Alex Vause (Prepon), an international drug smuggler and Chapman's one-time lover. Sentenced to serve a fifteen-month sentence, Chapman must survive the hardships of prison life, as she may have to be a different person to do so.
Women's prison show 'Orange Is the New Black' may be Netflix's best original yet
The female prison dramedy "Orange Is the New Black" is the fourth Netflix original series to debut this year (all 13 episodes of the first season should be available to stream after 12 a.m. Pacific tonight), and battling it out with the horror series "Hemlock Grove" for the lowest profile. "House of Cards" was the splashy, expensive acquisition, bought out from under the noses of HBO and company, starring Kevin Spacey, directed by David Fincher, and arriving with all the polish and fanfare of a premiere cable drama. The new season of "Arrested Development" was the resurrection of a beloved comedy series that was canceled much too soon in the mid-'00s. And yet each was something of a disappointment: "House of Cards" felt formulaic and emotionally empty, while "Arrested Development" struggled to recreate the old magic with the characters mostly separated.
"Orange Is the New Black" has a creative pedigree (creator Jenji Kohan was responsible for Showtime's "Weeds"), but also has a relatively unknown leading lady in Taylor Schilling. Netflix has been promoting it heavily of late, and even ordered a second season before the first had debuted, but I had no idea what to expect when I began watching the first of six episodes made available for critics to review. At first the show felt merely like a pleasant surprise — Kohan and company surpassing the most minimal of expectations — but as I began buzzing through one hour after another after another(*) in that addictive Netflix way where episodes are stacked appealingly in front of you like Pringles, I was feeling genuine enjoyment. "Orange Is the New Black" is perhaps the least-heralded Netflix original so far. It's also the most satisfying.
(*) For a company specializing in streaming video, Netflix has a remarkably terrible streaming player for press, one that frequently tends to crash when you so much as pause the action for a moment. I say this not to complain about the not-so-terrible burdens of being a TV critic, but to illustrate just how much I was enjoying the show. The Netflix player for press is so aggravating to use that I'd have stopped after maybe two episodes if I'd found "Orange" to be even average. Instead, I watched all six, frequently cursing the people who wrote the original code for Java.
Once again, Kohan finds herself telling the story of a pampered white woman whose life is turned upside down by an involvement in marijuana distribution. This time, our heroine is Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a secure Brooklyn hipster who dreams of her artisanal soap line being available for sale at Barney's, but who as a younger woman dated a drug trafficker named Alex (Laura Prepon) and occasionally did money runs for her. Alex gets busted, Piper is named as a conspirator — not long, she notes ruefully, before the statute of limitations would have run out — and takes a plea to serve 15 months at a women's federal penitentiary.
The series is based on a memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, who served as a consultant on the series, and the fictionalized Piper serves as our initial, relatable entry point into prison life. On her first day inside, one of the prison counselors evokes the name of a classic TV series set in another prison, telling her, "This isn't 'Oz.' Women fight with gossip and rumors." "Oz" creator Tom Fontana would describe incarcerated lawyer Tobias Beecher as "the HBO subscriber," and there are ways in which Kohan uses Piper in similar fashion. But she's also aware that her heroine has led a fairly pampered, ridiculous existence — in one episode, a present-day storyline about the vengeful head of the kitchen staff (an unrecognizable, Russian-accented Kate Mulgrew) trying to starve Piper is contrasted with flashbacks of Piper and her fiancé Larry (Jason Biggs) struggling through a five-day juice cleanse, and she makes Larry promise not to watch new "Mad Men" episodes until she's released — and quickly begins filling in the blanks on the women around her. Through Piper, we get to learn how the prison ecosystem works — the voluntary segregation by race, the legal and extra-legal aspects of the prison economy — but we also find out, through flashbacks and present-day dialogue, how the other inmates put themselves here and how incarceration has and hasn't changed them from the person they were before they were given a jumpsuit and an ID number.
It's with those stories — how a shy undocumented teenager from Jamaica grew into one of the prison's most feared elders (Michelle Hurst), the difficult gender transition a fireman made to wind up as the resident hairstylist (Laverne Cox), the way certain lesbian inmates (like Natasha Lyonne's recovering addict) feel when their current lovers prepare to return to men on the outside — that "Orange" becomes particularly engrossing. Schilling makes a good set of eyes and ears, and also deftly handles the show's abrupt transitions from dark drama to ridiculous comedy, but it's the series' clear-eyed take on women's prison culture as a whole that stands out the most.
I should say that I was never particularly fond of "Weeds" when I watched it, finding a lot of the comedy to be overly pleased with itself. Most of the comedic parts of "Orange" didn't especially work for me, either. But it's a measure of how well Kohan and company nail the character and sociological stuff that I ultimately didn't care how few of the jokes were landing. (And on the occasions when a gag does work, like a pair of black inmates doing a prolonged imitation of rich, spoiled white women, it works brilliantly.) And what's remarkable is that no matter how big and broad some of the humor and performances get, it never winds up undercutting the characters or the stakes. Pablo Schreiber hams it up as an obnoxious guard who sports a porn star mustache and will smuggle in contraband in exchange for sexual favors, but when a moment requires the audience to take his character seriously — say, when he moves Piper to the brink of tears while smugly taking liberties during a pat-down — it works.
"Orange Is the New Black" is not, as the counselor notes to Piper, the next "Oz." There's the occasional threat of violence, but the series is much more interested in how a group of women from a variety of racial and socio-economic backgrounds try or fail to connect when placed in the same enclosed space for months or years on end. But it evokes "Oz" in a very, very good way: it doesn't feel quite like anything that's been put on television (if we're still calling Netflix "television") before.
Netflix women's prison drama takes even better advantage of its great ensemble with these new episodes
"Orange Is the New Black" was my second-favorite television show of 2013 — if you can call a series distributed solely by Netflix" television" — and if the comedy-drama about the inmates at a women's federal prison doesn't wind up quite that high in my 2014 rankings, it'll be through no fault of its own. This has been an absurdly great year for the medium — even deeper than the last one, with incredible new entries like "Fargo" and "True Detective" to go along with long-absent veterans like "Louie," plus the continued excellence of "Mad Men," "Game of Thrones," etc. — and there's going to be a lot of crowding at the top when December arrives and I am legally required to rank things in numerical order based on how they score on Dr. J. Evans Pritchard's scale of poetic greatness.
But man oh man are the first six episodes of "Orange" season 2 wonderful. In many ways, they're better than their counterparts from the first season, because Jenji Kohan has a better sense of the stories, characters and actors she has on hand, and can deploy them in even more effective fashion.
The series started out as a kind of Barbie Goes To Prison story, focusing on pampered, superficial Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) going through massive culture shock after getting arrested for a drug crime committed years earlier with then-girlfriend Alex (Laura Prepon). Piper, like the heroine of "Orange" creator Jenji Kohan's Showtime series "Weeds," was prickly and irritating by design, even as she was also meant to be the audience's point of entry into this strange world. This was problematic at times, but as the show's first season moved along, we got to know many of Piper's fellow inmates incredibly well — to discover that they were far more complicated than the racial stereotypes she cowered from when she first arrived. One of the first season's most powerful sequences involves Piper's irritating fiance Larry (Jason Biggs) doing a public radio story about Piper's experience, and we see the faces of these fully-realized human beings as they listen to him describe them in the caricatured terms Piper placed them in at the start of the series.
As if to mess with our expectations, the show returns (Netflix is releasing all 13 episodes tonight at midnight Pacific) not with an hour demonstrating this deep, diverse ensemble cast, but an hour in which Piper is the only regular character to appear. (Alex pops up briefly, but Prepon is a guest star this season who will appear sporadically.) But it's a strong episode — illustrating how much the events of the first season changed Piper, even as our perceptions of so many other characters changed — and it also demonstrates an awareness of the difference of the Netflix distribution model. Because Kohan knew going in that season 2 would be available for fans to instantly binge if they wanted, there's no need to worry about an all-Piper episode being the audience's first exposure to the show in nearly a year, and their only exposure to the new season for a week.
You can dive right into the next episode, which offers plenty of Taystee (Danielle Brooks), Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), Nichols (Natasha Lyonne), Red (Kate Mulgrew), Sophia (Laverne Cox) and company, and then you can keep going. And though the season starts off with a Piper-centric episode, the main arc of the season (at least through the six episodes I've seen) has almost nothing to do with her, and everything to do tensions between the prison's various ethnic enclaves, many of them exacerbated by the arrival of Vee (Lorraine Toussaint, outstanding), a criminal so old-school she still refers to the guards as "screws," much to the amusement of younger inmates like Poussey (Samira Wiley).
So there's more of the whole ensemble this year — including lots of wonderful "Lost"-style flashback sequences for the supporting players — and also more of a narrative thrust to the season. Where last year was driven largely by Piper's assimilation into the prison culture and her on-again, off-again feelings for both Alex and Larry, here there's a bigger story that ramps up the tension and pace while still allowing for all the character touches Kohan and her team do so well. It's the show it was last year, but in many ways better. It's also in a better year, and we'll see how both the show and the year stack up come December, but right now, it's an enormous pleasure to have it back and in such fine form.
