The Great Orange Is the New Black Is Suddenly the Best Netflix Series Yet
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GRANTLAND The Great Orange Is the New Black Is Suddenly the Best Netflix Series Yet
By Andy Greenwald on July 15, 2013 4:30 PM ET
I hate the Netflix distribution model, and the way, every few weeks, it backs up the content truck at the stroke of midnight and offloads 13 hours of industrial-strength television. I've written at length about how this emphasis on quantity robs quality material of the time necessary to consider or even savor it, how it mutes the great beehive of conversation that has sprung up around TV in recent years and replaced it with the lonely, furtive clicks of a solitary remote control. We don't always eat for the sole purpose of getting full, and we shouldn't consume art that way, either. There's a reason you'd never order anything à la carte that can be found in an all-you-can-eat buffet. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that Netflix, thus far, has chosen projects that actually benefit from bingeing. House of Cards had all of the weight of a great cable drama but almost none of the depth; it was probably better served as a lurid, late-night entertainment. Hemlock Grove was a quick genre cash-in, something mildly diverting and occasionally horrifying to slot between streams of An American Werewolf in London and Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman. And Arrested Development ... well, no one is more primed to stuff his face than a comedy nerd who's been starving for seven years. Even better, the all-at-once episode dump helped creator Mitch Hurwitz gin up an overlapping conceit that helped explain away the varying commitment levels of the cast and the middling humor in the scripts. It's always beneficial to tell someone you've disappointed that they just didn't understand the intent. Orange Is the New Black arrived late last week in typical fashion, crashing onto the Netflix servers with all the grace of a Jay-Z app download. Created by Weeds dispensary Jenji Kohan, it's a light dramedy about a bubbly, Whole Foods–shopping blonde sent to a minimum-security women's prison. Expectations were slight; hype was nil. But if you're thinking that this was just an attempt to kill time before Let's Go to Prison is available to stream, or for Netflix shareholders to get in on some of that sweet Caged Heat cash that Cinemax After Dark has been raking in for years, then it's time to think again. Because Orange Is the New Black is excellent. Like, jaw-dropping, spirit-lifting excellent. It's instantly the best original series in Netflix's brief history. (Sorry, Little Steven! Here's hoping you can find some solace in your side job.) It's also the first example of how and why Netflix's strategy might be good for more than just insomnia after all. As the creator of Weeds — eight seasons, 102 episodes, and a pair of Emmys — Jenji Kohan can take a meeting with anyone in Hollywood. She can also, if she so wishes, choose to transition gracefully into the next phase of her showrunning career the way many before her have: by inking a profitable overall deal with a studio and spending a few happy, idle years dreaming up concepts and dabbling with rewrites, secure in the knowledge that the paychecks will continue even if nothing ever makes it to air. But Kohan fell in love with Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison, a memoir by Piper Kerman, and was committed to bringing it to series. I don't know any of the particulars, but I imagine Showtime, Kohan's former home, was among the first to pass. Mounting a new show these days isn't just an enormous expense in dollars, it's also expensive in perception. Even with its tough-sell subject matter, Orange might have flown at the old Showtime, when it was content to counterprogram the alpha males of HBO with a flurry of women-in-high-concept-peril dramedies (Weeds, The Big C, Nurse Jackie, etc.). But post-Homeland, everything president David Nevins puts on the air needs to blow up bigger than [HOMELAND SPOILERS REDACTED]. Netflix applied a similar policy when it outbid HBO for House of Cards, spending a fortune for the cachet of luring big-screen vets (and, it should be noted, small-screen n00bs) David Fincher and Kevin Spacey to a company that was, until recently, mostly famous for keeping the USPS in business. But with Orange it's using its deep pockets — and apparent disregard for ratings — in a more hopeful, not to mention unique, way: to finance the passion projects of established television talents. It's worth noting how rare this actually is. HBO produced four seasons of Treme and FX took a wild gamble on the auteurist abilities of Louis C.K., but really those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Orange — which balances jokes about juice cleanses and "artisanal bath products" with the sort of real talk about race, gender, and identity usually limited to college seminars — requires a tap dance of tone so delicate it would make Fred Astaire look like Fred Flintstone. In the wrong hands, this premise would (and possibly should) be a disaster. But, in the first few episodes at least, Kohan is able to achieve something here so masterful it's dizzying. Orange burns with the kind of laughter that usually only comes after tears; it's audacious, shocking, intimate, and intense. For the first time, bingeing seems like a good idea, if only because I can't imagine the cupboards ever running bare. The series is packed with more strong female roles than most casting directors see in a year, it attempts more hairpin turns than your average NASCAR driver, and it weaves in riveting, universe-expanding flashbacks in a way no one's managed since the first season of Lost. "This isn't Oz," says the beleaguered counselor in the pilot — and thank goodness for that. Taylor Schilling — best not remembered for her turn in the unasked-for movie version of Atlas Shrugged — is revelatory in the potentially thankless lead role of Piper Chapman. Piper is a vivacious "good person" with a burgeoning soap business and a nebbishy fiancé (Jason Biggs, once again playing Jewish and once again whacking off on camera), but she's hiding one big secret: Instead of bumming around Europe or moving back in with her parents after college, Piper spent her twenties as a love-struck drug mule in a relationship with a smoldering Laura Prepon (That '70s Show). When, a decade later, Piper is sentenced to 15 months in the big house, her yuppie-fantasy version of herself washes away like so much aloe butter down the drain. It takes real talent to make ignorance and privilege seem sympathetic; Schilling's Piper is often the butt of the joke, but the actress never winks. It's the difference between Reese Witherspoon in Election and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde 2. Kohan is well aware that the conceit of "white girl surrounded by scary ethnic cons" is a non-starter, both dramatically and otherwise, so she has taken great pains to add nuance to Piper even as she surrounds Schilling with the most surprising and engaging rogue's gallery of supporting players since The Office. There's the happily resurrected Natasha Lyonne as a sardonic burnout, comedian Lea DeLaria as a butch schemer, Michelle Hurst as an imposing, elderly neat freak, and, in a groundbreaking performance, the divine Laverne Cox as a transgender fireman turned hair stylist. Star Trek nuts will be stunned to see their beloved Captain Janeway having the time of her life as Red, a Russian enforcer who trades favors and runs the kitchen with a hammer and sickle (she sends Tampax sandwiches to anyone who dares cross her). I can only hope future episodes (and seasons; Orange was renewed for a second before it even premiered) will find more space for fascinating fringe characters like the spacey Yoga Jones or the ferocious Watson. There are worse people to be locked up with, even if it's only on your couch. In the fourth episode, "Imaginary Enemies," a story line involving a purloined screwdriver plays audience expectation like a violin, leading to one of the more satisfying (and surprising) outcomes I can remember. I've got eight episodes left and I can't wait to write more once I've finished. There's so much stuff for Kohan to play with here that, after she's handled the heavy lifting of exposition in the pilot, it becomes obvious why she was so insistent on seeing this project through. Her version of Litchfield Correctional Facility, with its tribal politics, its leering guards, and its radically recalibrated definitions of both terror and hope, starts to feel less like a story engine and more like the story engine. Nothing is off-limits, and I have no idea what's around the bend. Many creators talk about the freedoms offered by television's new platforms, but Kohan is one of the few to snatch those freedoms, stuff them in a bag, and take off on a wild joyride like this. I understand why other networks may have been leery of Orange Is the New Black, but I hope its success leads other frustrated creators to take their zombie and antihero-free scripts over to Netflix. And I hope Netflix will embrace this identity as an artist-empowering risk taker over the many others — Prestige-Gobbling HBO Lite, Fan-Servicing Resurrection Machine — it has tried on for size. Netflix loves to talk big about paradigm shifts and the crumbling old media order. But as any of the cons on this show will tell you, it's one thing to say you're going to break the rules and another to actually shatter them to pieces.
In Women in Prison Dramedy 'Orange is the New Black,' Netflix Has Its Strongest Original Series to Date July 1, 2013 By Alison Willmore There's been a lot of discussion about how binge-viewing, DVRs and on demand availability have changed the way we approach television, how it's allowed for more complex, serialized storytelling, how episodes no longer have the same obligation to keep new or sporadic viewers in mind. The far end of this evolution is Netflix, whose original shows have been unveiled whole seasons at a time -- no need for "previously on" tags, no push for installments to end on cliffhangers to pull audiences back next week. So what does it mean that "Orange is the New Black," the newest Netflix series premiering on July 11th, is both the streaming service's best so far and its least structurally adventurous?
Maybe just that, in the rush to shake off the constraints of traditional TV, it's best not to forget the elements that make TV what it is -- while it's freeing to not have to have a character woodenly remind us all in a wedged-in monologue about what happened last week, it's hard to pull off a 13-hour movie that happens to be broken up into hourlong chunks, and even the best attempts to do so have had uneven results. "Orange is the New Black" has actual episode arcs in addition to a larger story, and they adeptly reflect the gradual adaptation of its main character to the world of a federal women's prison into which she's been introduced. An ill-chosen comment about the quality of the food, a courtship by another inmate, the discovery that a potentially dangerous tool has gone missing from the electrical shop -- these incidents become the pegs on which stories about the prisoners' pasts and presents are hung. It feels like it's genuinely fit to its format, not attempting to leave it behind. "Orange is the New Black" is also warmly but acidly funny -- like the first and best season of "Weeds" made sharper and less adorable. It's the second series from showrunner Jenji Kohan, who created the Mary-Louise Parker Showtime comedy, and who here works from a memoir written by Piper Kerman about a 15-month sentence she served for the decade-old crime of helping her then-girlfriend's drug smuggling ring. Taylor Schilling plays the protagonist, here called Piper Chapman, a Connecticut girl who's since outgrown her drifting, criminal-dabbling, bi-curious phase and is living a pleasantly hip Brooklyn life, engaged to writer Larry (Jason Biggs) and running an artisanal soaps and lotions line with her best friend Polly (Maria Dizzia). Piper is the kind of character who invites a certain amount of schadenfreude -- she's a Whole Foods devotee who likes to lecture about remembering to bring canvas bags, and whose progressive leanings are largely theoretical.
Rather than frame itself as a straightforward fish-out-of-water story, "Orange is the New Black" runs full force at its heroine's unconscious privilege, showcasing the ways in which she has internalized a certain allowed indulgence with rules in approach to her life and the ways in which she underestimates or unknowingly condescends to her fellow inmates. The former aspect informs the underlying premise of the show -- she, like many a kid from a comfortable background, was sowing some wild oats, and she feels a sense of unfairness that she should be held fully accountable for this when clearly she's a nice white girl who should be given a slap on the wrist.
The fact that she actually did what she was accused of, and that she's thrown in with a group of women who've never had the luxury of presuming they'd be left off the hook for law-breaking, gives her character's journey a welcome fractiousness. Piper needs to fit in less than she needs to come to terms with the frictionlessness of life as a well-educated, upper middle class Caucasian that she's unthinkingly enjoyed, and the fact that it no longer really applies.
That regrounding of perspective, so that it's Piper's life that starts to look outrageously entitled and narrow, is the great strength of "Orange is the New Black." It's not just the story of what prison did for Piper that's treated as some unwilling adventure in extreme tourism for a woman who'll later be able to write a book about it -- and Schilling, who proved herself a solid TV lead in NBC's "Nurse Jackie" knock-off "Mercy," is able to make the character one whose story we're invested in without needing to soften her self-pitying or persnickety moments. (Piper's uncertainty about how to react to the un-PC racial groupings into which everyone has divided themselves is one of the entertaining early touches.) And while Piper provides the entryway into the world of the women's prison, she also quickly becomes just one of many perspectives from which we see the day-to-day there, as the show makes heavy use of flashbacks to delve into the lives of the other inmates, from the regal Russian Galina "Red" Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew), who becomes an early antagonist, to transwoman Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox), from brusque longtimer Claudette Pelage (Michelle Hurst) to bawdy former addict Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne).
The premise of "Orange is the New Black" allows it to have not just one of the most female-heavy ensembles currently on television but also one of the most ethnically and physically diverse, and it's genuinely bracing to see such a variety of actresses (including familiar faces like Laura Prepon, who plays Piper's ex Alex Vause) in a story that isn't fundamentally centered around the quest to find a romantic partner. Not that romances, both hetero and not, are absent -- one of the inmates (Dascha Polanco) has a sweet if risky flirtation with a guard while the strain Piper's imprisonment places on her relationship with Larry is an ongoing thread, and lesbian relationships and sex are part of prison life and treated with the same unabashed frankness as all other aspects of its grounded and sometimes grubbily physical reality.
While the series has its gritty moments, it's set in a minimum security prison and provides a counterpoint to all of the violent dramas and power plays of something like "Oz" -- Piper's first beef with a fellow inmate ends not with a shanking but with her realizing she'll have to figure out a way to make amends with very limited means. "Orange is the New Black" has neither the intricate construction of the fourth season of "Arrested Development" nor the high gloss of prestige of "House of Cards" (though it does have Jodie Foster as an episode director), but in its tart, empathetic narrative it manages to have more vitality than both put together. http://www.indiewire.com/article/orange-is-the-new-black-review-netflix Orange Is the New Black: TV Review Netflix's new dramedy, from "Weeds" creator Jenji Kohan, stars Taylor Schilling as a woman forced to spend 15 months in prison for her unwitting role in an international drug smuggling ring. July 1, 2013 By Tim Goodman
The Bottom Line "Weeds" creator Jenji Kohan has crafted a surprisingly strong women’s prison drama that expertly balances humor and drama while both embracing the cliches of the concept and turning them on their head with aplomb.
Perhaps it’s a hazard of the professionally jaded, but reading about the premise of new series sparks all kinds of red flags: It’s been done before. It’s been done too much. It sounds stupid. It’s from a creator with a spotty track record. It’s inherently dubious. Even if it works at the beginning, the long-term viability isn’t there. Shall I continue? And so it was with a welcome sigh of relief and a telling amount of optimism that the first four episodes of Netflix’s new drama series Orange Is the New Black, premiering July 11, not only surprised but at various points astounded. Series creator Jenji Kohan (Weeds), has crafted a dramedy based on the popular memoir of the same name from Piper Kerman and infused it with an unpredictable flow of laughs, seriousness, an impressive and measured reveal of character backstories, and enormous potential. Could it all still go off the rails? Sure. Anytime there’s clashing tonality – a staple of Weeds – the balance can go wrong with alarming swiftness and mess up a good thing. But I eagerly devoured the first four episodes and will no doubt watch the other two Netflix made available to critics before polishing the season off when it drops in its entirety on July 11. The series focuses on Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling, who gives a brilliant performance), a happy 32- year-old city girl living in Brooklyn, who recently started a line of bath soaps and products with her best friend. Piper’s engaged to the charmingly low-key Larry (Jason Biggs), who can’t believe his luck at finding an upbeat, funny, loveable person like Piper. All is great. Except for this thing she needs to do first – self-surrender at an upstate women’s prison. That was news to Larry. As was the fact that Piper used to be a lesbian. And the arrest is for being a mule for some drug money she got through customs in Europe. As this scene, told in flashback, plays out, Larry can’t believe what he’s hearing. “I feel like I’m in a Bourne movie. Have you killed?” It’s a funny scene, and there are plenty of them in the first hour as the couple comes to terms with the fact Piper has to spend 15 months in prison as part of her plea deal. As Piper explains, she was just 22 years old, in love with a lesbian named Alex (Laura Prepon, who is also strong here) and swept up in the thrill of traveling around Europe. She didn’t really catch on that Alex was part of an international drug smuggling ring. “Then it got scary and I ran away and became the nice blonde lady I was supposed to be,” she tells Larry. Schilling is so believable as Piper that she makes Orange Is the New Black work from the second we meet her. She’s sweet, she’s adorable, she’s funny – you buy in immediately that she made a mistake a decade ago and got out and started living her life with positivity and renewed focus. Unbeknownst to her, the drug ring would get busted, she’d get named as an accomplice (statute of limitations: 12 years) and would plead out and pay her penance instead of trying to fight the charge in court and risk a more lengthy sentence. It’s essential to root for Piper from the start and Kohan makes us do that with ease. Paired with Biggs, who brings his laid-back, nice-guy personality to the story, viewers are immediately set up with the disparity between what their lives are now and what they’ll be when Piper self-surrenders. That’s partly why the first hour, in particular, is funny. The couple has made the decision to pay dues and move on. How long can 15 months really be – especially if there’s good behavior involved? “Please keep my website updated!” Piper tells Larry, right after musing aloud and somewhat forlornly that by the time she gets out, two or three new versions of the iPhone will have come and gone. There’s a lot of humor to mine as Piper prepares to self-surrender. She tells Larry as they’re hanging out at the beach: “I’m going to get ripped – like Jackie Warner ripped. And I’m going to read everything on my Amazon wish list.” Of course, things change when Piper starts doing time. And this is where Orange Is the New Black starts really nailing the delicate balancing act of a woman derided by other inmates as “Taylor Swift” suffering the indignities of prison. This was always going to be the dangerous confluence that Kohan faced. Balancing both light and searing comedy with a serious, insightful attempt at drama is a tough road. It may eventually be the undoing of Orange, but for now, Kohan’s manipulation of tone is incredibly impressive. Because along with her writing staff she’s able to give you Piper’s relatively normal outside life and what changes when she’s on the inside. Some of those changes are more grand opportunities at humor, of course. She’s a bit mopey on the phone with Larry – the money she’s allowed to spend inside hasn’t arrived, so she’s struggling. “You’re not supposed to eat the pudding because it’s been to Desert Storm,” she tells him, exhaling. When her mother arrives for a visit, she asks Piper what she did to her hair, which has had big strands cut out. “I had to give it to a transsexual. For a weave.” There’s a backstory to that, of course, that makes it both funny and actually a bit sad. What elevates Orange Is the New Black to impressive levels is how it shifts gears to the serious. Piper tells a fellow inmate that in these early days in prison, she still can’t shake the feeling that she’ll be able to go home when the day ends. (“Your head’s not here,” her prison counselor tells her, noting it takes a while to arrive.) Piper tells the fellow inmate that sometimes when she opens her eyes for the first time in the morning, the reality of where she is hasn’t set in yet. There’s a look on her face about how nice that feels. Then she adds, “But when I do realize, I can’t breathe. Then I want to cry and throw shit and kill myself.” During her prison orientation, Kohan inserts a necessary and true line from a counselor: “This isn’t Oz,” referencing the HBO series about men in prison (necessary as acknowledgment that the format has been explored before and true in that the shows are after different ends). Then the counselor adds: “I want you to know that you do not have to have lesbian sex.” It’s both funny as a statement, plus as a reference to Piper’s past that the counselor doesn’t know about, but also something that’s a concern on some level to her. And will “Taylor Swift” be attractive bait in prison? You bet. Another element of what makes Orange successful in its execution is that after dropping Piper into the prison, meeting all kinds of strangers and trying to suss out friend from foe, Kohan slowly shifts away from Piper’s perspective and starts to tell the backstories of the women who are in there. That part is a particularly neat trick because it adds much more nuance than just having Piper face various “types” in her 15-month term. Early on, Orange is trying to figure out how to keep Biggs involved as Larry, but is doing a good job. There’s a funny scene where he’s talking to Piper by phone and she says, “Promise me you’re not watching Mad Men without me.” Again, it stands alone as a joke but then morphs into another sentiment entirely because Piper is dreaming about her release and catching up with Larry; she wants to spend nights curled up together, eating her favorite foods and watching a show they both love. She wants to believe their connection can last 15 months and be repaired. There are moments of absurdity here as well, of course. Some of the humor works, some doesn’t. Kohan cast Pablo Schreiber (The Wire) as a prison guard the inmates called Pornstache, and he is, without a doubt, a walking cliche played for laughs. And yet he works right alongside a guard that just returned from Afghanistan and, in his newbie status, has a much more tender approach to what’s going on at the jail. (Besides, ensemble casts invariably have characters that don’t always work. I really like Showtime’s Ray Donovan but have trouble not only with Elliott Gould’s character and performance, but with a few other broader types – but for me, their shortcomings don’t ruin the series or detract from it.) Again, tones clashing randomly is a hallmark of Orange Is the New Black. Some of the inmate characters are broadly drawn, others less so, and some evolve as Kohan slowly tells you their tale. Kate Mulgrew in particular is interesting as Galina “Red” Reznikov, the Russian-prison powerhouse who runs the kitchen. How she got there is so far quite intriguing, with surprising nuance. In fact, surprising may be the key description for Orange Is the New Black. It constantly offers more than you expect, and even when it delivers something either predictable or straight from the “women’s prison drama” handbook, it then counters with something fresh or unexpected. Netflix has already renewed Orange for a second season, but we’ll know more about the show’s ability to keep up this difficult balance as the episodes from this freshman season play out. In any case, it has staying power, so by all means self-surrender to it. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/orange-is-new-black-tv-578162 'Orange Is The New Black' Review: Subversive Netflix Prison Drama Proves Addictive July 10, 2013 By Maureen Ryan There was some grumbling when "Orange Is the New Black," a prison drama that debuts on Netflix Thursday, was renewed for a second season before the first had even appeared. I couldn't happier about the early renewal. "Orange" is one of the best new programs of the year, and the six episodes I've seen have left me hungry to see more. Creator Jenji Kohan hasn't just given us an intriguingly compromised lead character, she's also created an entire world, an alternately sly and sad pressure cooker that offers an enticing range of complicated relationships and unstable power dynamics. But what may be most impressive is the fact that Kohan and her writers have fun with a whole array of "Women in Prison" tropes while allowing many of the central characters to have dignity, depth and even moments of pathos. This mixture of melodrama, subversive comedy and drama could have been a big ol' mess, but "Orange" ends up a rich, flavorful stew. In other words, "Orange" is the first Netflix original series that I'm seriously excited about. It doesn't have the big names of "House of Cards" or the name recognition of "Arrested Development," but it has vision and verve. It fits in well with the trend I've been calling "B-Movie TV": Like a host of other recent shows found online or on smaller networks, "Orange" is a scrappy, entertaining, low-budget program that doesn't try to be a Serious Drama, but instead uses the cover of a well-known genre to explore bracing and challenging places. The center of "Orange's" prison saga is Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), an engaged yuppie whose life is turned upside-down by a criminal conviction. Something that Chapman did in her past comes back to haunt her, and before she knows it, she's gone from a Whole Foods-and-"Mad Men" lifestyle to a bunk in a federal prison. To say she is a fish out of water is putting it mildly. The show certainly gets plenty of mileage out of Chapman's ongoing adjustment to prison culture, and Schilling plays her confusion and well-intentioned cluelessness with admirable resolve. Chapman desperately attempts to hang on to her old life -- during one phone conversation, she makes her fiancee (Jason Biggs) describe the groceries he's just bought, and she tries to keep managing the artisanal soap business she started with her best friend (fellow inmates are unimpressed by the fact that her products are sold at Barney's). But the realization that her efforts to cling to her old life are doomed dawns on her slowly through her first few weeks in a federal pen. In order to fit into her new environment, Chapman has to get her head in the game; she has to stop thinking like a privileged, organic-produce-eating urbanite and create a cagier, tougher identity. But doing that creates a gulf between the new inmate and her friends and family, one that only grows during brief visits and phone calls (the show doesn't call attention to this running gag, but every single time Piper calls home, a woman on the next phone is crying). It's a useful starting point for the show, but if "Orange" had focused too tightly on Chapman's story, it probably would have felt too claustrophobic (always a danger for prison-set shows). Kohan instead has given herself plenty of other directions in which to go by making the show a true ensemble piece: "Orange" explores the lives and connections of a whole host of prisoners, and flashbacks offer insight into how each of their lives ended up going off the rails. If I have one issue with "Orange," it's that these flashbacks could be even longer and meatier; the glimpses into the women's past lives are too tantalizingly brief in some cases. Where "Orange" sometimes wobbles is in its structure: Episodes of "Weeds," which Kohan also created, clocked in at under half an hour, and at times "Orange" episodes feel like two half-hour segments mushed together. It's not bad that storytellers are playing around with the idea of what an episode actually is, given the possibilities of all these new delivery systems, but sometimes that feels like an excuse to meander. And some characters veer into caricature, most notably Taryn Manning's Southern inmate and Piper's WASP mom, played Deborah Rush (who appeared as an identical character a few months ago on "Girls"). Still, given that most of "Orange's" running time is spent thoughtfully and wittily illuminating the lives of women whom most of society has rejected, the show's occasional lack of nuance and a mild tendency to sprawl are minor complaints. It's far easier to think of things to praise: Laura Prepon and Natasha Lyonne give terrific performances as fellow inmates (the charismatic Lyonne owns every scene she's in, and I could easily see "Orange" morphing into a vehicle for her cynical, bruised character). Kate Mulgrew gives wary, weary solidity to the role of the powerful Russian inmate who runs the kitchen, and Pablo Schrieber, Matt McGorry and Michael J. Harney are wonderful in very distinct ways as three very different guards. It is mind-boggling that so many disparate things hang together so well in "Orange," which manages to be both subversive and serious, sweet and viciously barbed. There's a guard-inmate romance that's so tender it's nearly "Everwood Behind Bars." There's a lunatic inmate named Crazy Eyes who more than lives up to her name, and on the other end of the subtlety spectrum, Laverne Cox gives an amazing performance as trans inmate, Sophia. Scenes of Sophia's pre-surgery life as a man whose wife is struggling with his choices are among the most moving on-screen moments I've seen all year. "Orange" features the usual array of fights, thefts, betrayals, mess-hall showdowns, odd couples, comedic complications and dangerous crises you'd expect from any prison drama, and like "Oz" before it, "Orange" treats matters of race with astonishing frankness. Several characters also have a fluid sexuality that is barely remarked upon (it's assumed that every woman's rating on the Kinsey scale is flexible once she is in prison -- or quite possibly before that). There's something refreshing about a show that delves headfirst into matters that other dramas reserve for Special Episodes or porn-tastic sidebars. Ultimately, it's easy to envision an "Orange" in which Chapman's story is just one of many jockeying for space and attention. Given its setting, perhaps it's unsurprising that the rest of the ensemble basically steals "Orange" out from under the new girl. Not for long, maybe. She's learning. "Orange Is The New Black" premieres on Netflix on July 11. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/orange-is-the-new-black_b_3574249.html
TV Review: Netflix Continues Hot Streak with Excellent ‘Orange is the New Black’ July 10, 2013 By Brian TT CHICAGO – Jenji Kohan’s “Orange is the New Black,” premiering in its entirety this Thursday, July 11, 2013 on Netflix for those of you who love your binge viewing, is one of those rare programs that gets better and better in memory. I encourage you NOT to watch it all in one sitting. Let it linger. Let it settle in. I have only seen the first two episodes and I’m happy to be able to anticipate the third, allowing the characters and themes of the first pair to strengthen in memory. This is genre-bending stuff, like the best of the first few seasons of “Weeds.” They could have just rode the support for “House of Cards” and “Arrested Development” but Netflix continues to impress.
Television Rating: 4.0/5.0
Based on the acclaimed memoir by Piper Kerman, “Orange is the New Black” might have a genre all to itself — the women’s prison comedy. Kohan, who proved her interest in relatively average people caught up in a life of crime on “Weeds,” goes back to the wrong side of the law with the fascinating Piper Chapman (the fearless Taylor Schilling, “The Lucky One,” “Mercy”), a woman who was caught up in the drug smuggling operation of her girlfriend (Laura Prepon) a decade ago and now has to do 15 months for the indiscretion. She leaves behind a supportive fiance (Jason Biggs) and plummets into a prison culture she can’t really understand. In some ways, it’s like high school with its cliques and power structures, but with a lot more actual danger.
Of course, the fictional Litchfield Prison (a stand-in for Danbury from the memoir) is filled with TV- ready personalities. There’s the Russian prison chef named Red (Kate Mulgrew), who Piper mistakenly insults on day one and soon learns that she may starve to death as a result of that drastic error. There’s the caustic Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), born-again Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), over-the-top Taystee (Danielle Brooks), transgendered Sophia (Laverne Cox), supportive Lorna (Yael Stone), and many many more. Men of this prison world are largely presented as bumbling idiots, whether it’s the goofy warden (Michael Harney) or the officer known as Pornstache (Pablo Schreiber). Orange is the New Black Photo credit: Netflix
How do we adapt to drastic change like prison? Kohan smartly recognizes that Piper isn’t going to (at least immediately) lose her basic goodness or even the personality she presents in the outside world (I love the little touches like when she asks her fiance to wait to watch “Mad Men” till she gets out or can’t understand why fellow inmates are laughing hysterically at “Good Luck Chuck.”) Piper feels like a genuine, three-dimensional character, thanks in no small part to the daring performance from Schilling, doing easily the best work of her career to date. The nature of the show means that a lot of the plotting has to revolve around how Piper responds to the new people and situation in her life and yet Schilling doesn’t make her merely a straight woman to the chaos. It’s a performance sure to be underrated. The supporting cast for “Orange is the New Black” is uniformly strong as well. Lyonne brings her typical energy, Stone is charming, Mulgrew dominates the second episode, and even Biggs works. It’s a crowded piece with tons of speaking roles (way more than “Weeds”) but Kohan proves adept at juggling multiple characters, arcs, and motivations. I watched “Orange is the New Black” last week and have enjoyed letting it sink in. Thinking about some of the characters, laughing at jokes (the loudspeaker announcement about the upcoming presentation of “Good Luck Chuck” is hilarious), and wondering where the characters are going next. And yet, as of tomorrow, you’ll be able to watch them all. Don’t rush this journey with Piper. Enjoy it. “Orange is the New Black” stars Taylor Schilling, Jason Biggs, Kate Mulgrew, Natasha Lyonne, Taryn Manning, Danielle brooks, Laverne Cox, Yael Stone, Michael Harney, and Pablo Schreiber. It was created by Jenji Kohan. It premieres on Netflix tomorrow, July 11, 2013. http://www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/21964/tv-review-netflix-continues-hot-streak-with-excellent- orange-is-the-new-black Obsessed Report Card: Orange Is the New Black July 11, 2013 By Megan Angelo
Clearly, 2013 is the year of Netflix killing it. And orange looks oh-so-good on them--first there was the citrus-hued return of Arrested Development (yeah, I counted orange accents throughout, 'cause I'm nerdy like that), and now it's rolled out Orange Is the New Black. This show is the new black, OK? You guys already knew I was excited about it, but episode one truly blew me away.
There's so much to love: Taylor Schilling is incredible--I daresay I had no idea how thoroughly she would destroy this role, having just The Lucky One to go on. It's not just pretty blonde in prison she has to pull off--it's no easy feat making two love affairs (one with a male fiance in the present, one with a female drug lord in the past) feel believable simultaneously. Also, Jason Biggs is adorable. Laura Prepon gets to actually be dark, instead of just a wiseass. And every single person in the prison, from the guards to the inmates, is magnetically cast. Something else that sets this show apart: I don't know about you, but I'm normally not a big fan of the flashback. Usually, they feel like shortcuts to me. But the ones in the pilot, meant to fill in Piper's love, crime and haircut history, feel more like novel flashbacks than TV ones--you could sink right into them. (Which makes sense, since the show is based on a book.) And has there ever been a first ep of a show that's harder to look away from? Between the eerily calm night before her sentence started and the cold-shower of newbie prison life, I was absolutely riveted. My two key cry-points: when she was weeping in the bathroom the night before she left, and when she almost had to get whisked away before she could say a proper goodbye to Mr. Biggs. (Yeah, I know that's not his name in the show, but that's what I call him in my head.) And I love the casual goodness/badness/normalness of all the women. For me, this show's an easy A. But let's talk gameplan: this being streaming, there's some flexibility here. The show premiered at midnight last night, so there's a good chance tonight will be your first night watching. I don't think this is gonna be a bingefest for most people--it's a rich, complicated show, and I think a little space between the eps is a good thing. But having watched ahead a little, I will say: you get to see more of Piper's peers' stories after the pilot. And things only get better from here, trust me. Largely facilitated by Natasha Lyonne.
Stunningly written Orange is the New Black is both poignant and hilarious July 10, 2013 By DAVID WIEGAND
The title is too clever by half, the setup doesn’t sound promising and the first episode isn’t entirely convincing, but it won’t take long for you to start thinking Orange Is the New Black might just be the best new show of the year. Yes, it’s that good — at least the first six episodes are. You can see for yourself when the entire first season becomes available for streaming on the Netflix site today. It’s getting old to say that Netflix is terraforming the entire television landscape, but what else can you say when Weeds creator Jenji Kohan whips a up rich, stunningly written, poignant yet hysterically funny 13-episode series about a wide-eyed former debutante who starts her 15-month prison sentence thinking it may be a wonderful growth experience? Needless to say, she has another thing coming, but soon enough, her incarceration for drug smuggling does become a growth experience in ways she never could have imagined when she was a wealthy young New Yorker planning her wedding to her live-in writer boyfriend and developing an upscale soap and toiletries business with her best friend. Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling, Argo) had everything going for her when her life was upended by some bad choices she’d made years earlier when she was involved with Alex Vause (Laura Prepon, That ‘70s Show). Now she’s living with Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs, American Pie), and her new business venture with best friend Polly (Maria Dizzia) is going so well, they have a shot at getting their product line into Barneys. Few lives could ever change as radically as Piper’s does on her first day of prison. She intends to keep her head down and do her time quietly, but right off the bat, she expresses discontent about the food as if she was just served canned chili at Gramercy Tavern. Unfortunately, the militant inmate cook, a Russian woman with dyed beet-coloured hair named Red (Kate Mulgrew), takes umbrage at the “review” and decides to starve the newbie in retribution. There’s nothing novel about viewing a prison as a microcosm — it’s what you do with that concept that counts, and Kohan and her writers do a lot. The balkanized population includes Latinas, African Americans, Caucasians, Caucasian religious zealots, elderly inmates and other groups. Within each mini nation, there are all kinds of complicated relationships and fascinating individuals. There are a mother and daughter who hate each other, a transgender inmate (Laverne Cox) whose former wife taught him how to dress attractively as a woman, a white supremacist-religious nut named Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), an older woman named Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst) whose tough exterior hides a broken heart, an oversexed lesbian, a former druggie named Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne) who has had to master survival skills in and out of prison, and all kinds of current and former lovers, including Piper’s ex, Alex Vause. The characters are all nuanced, original, unpredictable and, most of all, credible at every moment. We not only accept them in the now of their lives, but as they used to be when we see them in extended flashbacks woven throughout the series to tell us about their journeys. In some cases, we don’t even know what crime they committed to get sent to jail, but that’s not the point. With Weeds, Kohan has already demonstrated a fascination with how circumstances shape personality and sometimes make it necessary for people to do things they’d otherwise never think of doing. In Piper’s case, now that she’s in prison, it’s called adapting. But when she was with Alex, love was to blame for carrying drugs across borders. Other inmates had to deal with their own motivational circumstances in the past. Kohan doesn’t try to apologize for what these women did any more than she ever felt like apologizing for Nancy Botwin’s pot business in Weeds. It’s not about apologies, and it isn’t about trying to justify the women’s actions or crimes in any way: That’s really beside the point in the moral scheme of Orange Is the New Black, and it’s one of the reasons we’re able to empathize so fully with these women. There simply is not a bad performance in the series. In fact, there are virtually none that even qualify as only “pretty good.” Schilling has the most difficult job because Piper is such a clueless wimp at the start of the series and has to evolve almost completely in a credible way. It’s not just that she has to wise up to how to survive in prison — she also learns that many of the key assumptions she had about her life on the outside were perhaps misguided. With her hair darkened and wearing horn-rim glasses, Prepon has never been better, and I freely admit I haven’t always found her a convincing actress in the past. Mulgrew’s Red is the picture of secretly tender-hearted toughness. The great Natasha Lyonne would steal the whole series if it weren’t for the fact she has such amazing competition. I especially love Yael Stone as Morello, a Kewpie doll face and a singular accent out of a ‘30s noir film making her memorable far beyond the relatively small size of her part. Want more? How about Lea DeLaria as butch inmate “Big Boo” Black who vows revenge on anyone who takes her woman? Danielle Brooks as boisterous inmate “Taystee” Jefferson, Nick Sandow as creepy prison official Joe Caputo who keeps tissues and hand lotion available to use after office visits with the inmates, Uzo Aduba as the aptly named “Crazy Eyes” Warren who is aggressively crushing on Piper — stunning work by every one of them. The scripts, by Garry Lennon, Liz Friedman, Nick Jones and Kohan, and direction by Andrew McCarthy, Michael Trim and Jodie Foster, among others, are absolutely top notch. In every case, there is an abiding feeling for character and authenticity that helps elevate Orange Is the New Black to a new definition of television excellence. http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1141123-jail-drama-raises-bar-for-tv-excellence Yes, You Should Watch Orange Is the New Black This Weekend July 12, 2013 By June Thomas
Television is like a shopping mall in your living room. Malls are all different in that no two offer the exact same lineup of stores, stands, and Orange Julius franchises. Nevertheless, you can walk into a shopping center in Manchester, N.H., or Manchester, England, and never be surprised. There’ll be a department store, shoe shops, Hot Topic knockoffs, and a food court. The names on the stores may vary, but the mix remains the same. And so it is with television. Hundreds of channels, thousands of shows, but for the most part, it’s just the same procedurals, reality competitions, family dramas, docu-soaps, sitcoms, and antihero stressfests, just with different titles. So much choice, but you know what you’re going to get when you sit down to watch. I just finished the 13 episodes of Orange Is the New Black, which Netflix released on Thursday morning, and for the first time in a long time, I turned off the TV set feeling like I’d just had a great time browsing through a store I’d never seen before. I’m not sure why Orange seemed so fresh. The story of an upper-middle-class white woman’s incarceration in an upstate New York prison has many familiar components. I’ve watched every episode of Oz. I’ve seen TV shows set in women’s prisons before (Within These Walls, Prisoner Cell Block H, Bad Girls). I’ve seen shows that find drama—usually with a capital D—in the same source as The Real World: take people who usually don’t mix, put them in close quarters, and wait for the sparks to fly. And, of course, I’ve seen programs that use fictional scenarios to explore real-world problems. In Orange Is the New Black, as in many such shows—including the ones I name-checked in the previous paragraph—the entry character, in this case Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), is privileged and educated. She’s an NPR-listening, Mad Men-watching, big-city-dwelling, wise-cracking intellectual. She’s just like “us,” in other words. And none of “us” would ever expect to go to prison. Perhaps because even a show produced on the Netflix model, in which the entire series is made available on release day, has to convey a lot of exposition in the first episode, the pilot, in which Piper prepares for her incarceration, is the most clichéd and the least engaging. (Perhaps by way of compensation, the first 15 minutes contain pretty much all the bare flesh that’s on display in the entire 13 episodes.) We learn that the prison inmates are segregated by race (“It’s tribal, not racist,” Morello tells Chapman during orientation), that only one toilet stall has a door, and that the place isn’t as scary as it seems. The reason the Litch—the federal prison in Litchfield, N.Y.—isn’t scary is that it’s a place where people make an effort to get along. Most of the women have issues: drug addiction, messed-up love affairs in and outside the hoosegow, medical conditions, and the myriad problems associated with poverty. But they don’t create more problems for themselves if they can avoid it. The inmates are true to their friends and protectors, but women rarely make irrational stands out of blind loyalty. Meanwhile, a plot thread in which Chapman’s fiance Larry (Jason Biggs), a wannabe writer, capitalizes on her incarceration by writing about it for the New York Times and talking about it on a This American Life -like radio show does a great job of exposing how skeezy the outside world can be. Larry’s friends celebrate his achievements, even though his newfound fame derives from carelessly trading on other people’s secrets. Ethical standards that win Larry fame and success would lead to social exclusion in prison—and the prisoners’ attitude seems like the right one. As is to be expected from a show based on a memoir, Chapman remains at the center of the story throughout the series, but the lens opens out to look at the lives of the other women in the Litch as well. Thanks to liberal use of flashbacks, we come to understand how they came to be behind bars—though we don’t necessarily pity or even sympathize with them. Sophia Burset, a former firefighter who turned to crime to pay for a sex change and to buy the love of her son, is lovable, smart, and caring, but she’s also obscenely selfish. Only a couple of inmates—and several of the prison staff—are completely unsympathetic. None are entirely clichéd. Even when Orange Is the New Black makes big political points, it does so with a light touch. After Taystee—a charming cut-up who is capable and useful in prison, doing great work in the prison library —finally gets out, she soon returns: In the real world, she can’t get a job that pays enough for an apartment, and besides, she still owes $900 of “fees” to the prison. “Everyone I know is poor, in jail, or gone. Don’t nobody ask ’bout how my day went. … I know how to play it here,” she tells her prison friend. Of course, Orange Is the New Black has its share of relationship drama, interpersonal conflict, danger, love, and betrayal. It’s gloriously soapy and genuinely moving. Who knew that the story of strangers learning to live together could be so entertaining? Actually, we all knew that. But it’s rarely done this intelligently or this well. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/07/12/orange_is_the_new_black_review_netflix_show_is_s mart_moving_and_fun_watch.html You’ve Gotta Binge on the New Netflix Series ‘Orange Is the New Black’ The eternal streaming question—to lose sleep and watch all the episodes of a new show at once, or go one at a time—has a clear answer with ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ the best thing on TV right now. July 11, 2013 By Andrew Romano
To binge or not to binge? When it comes to Orange Is the New Black, the new Netflix series by Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, that is the question.
Orange debuted on Netflix this morning at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time—all 13 episodes at once, as has become Netflix’s wont. (The streaming movie-and-TV site did the same thing with its first two in-house series, House of Cards and a revival of Arrested Development.) And thus viewers who have enjoyed Netflix’s original programming to date, and who are also somewhat impatient, especially about a crackling good television show, and who therefore tend to become rather, shall we say, “addicted” when they no longer have to wait a week for their next fix—not that I would know anything about that—were faced with a very trendy dilemma. Do I indulge my streaming-video habit? Do I lose sleep? Do I miss work in the morning? Or do I step away from the remote and regress, becoming the quaint sort of character who watches only one episode at a time? Dear reader, I confess: I chose the former. I watched five straight installments of Orange. And now I have resurfaced, marginally paler, from the strange, glowing not-world of late-night streaming video to urge you to binge on Orange, too. Before we go any further, a disclaimer. Orange is not a Great Television Show. Not yet, at least. It may be the best thing on quote-unquote TV right now, but that’s only because Game of Thrones just ended and Breaking Bad doesn’t return until August. And yet Orange is the kind of show that deserves to be seen—and that might have been overlooked, or even dismissed, in that bygone era before bingeing on a new series was possible. I say this because if one episode was all I could have watched, I would have dismissed it. The premise of Orange is promising enough. A WASP-y Smith alumna named Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) has a lesbian affair after college. Her paramour Alex (That ’70s Show’s Laura Prepon) works for an international heroin cartel. Seeking adventure—and the chance to prove that she’s more “special” than her milquetoast Connecticut upbringing would seem to allow—Piper eventually agrees to carry a suitcase stuffed with $100,000 in drug money through a couple of airports. Fast forward. Ten years later. Piper is now engaged to a writer named Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs, playing a post-grad-school update on his American Pie character). They live in the sort of whitewashed Brooklyn apartment that tends to show up, artfully overexposed, in the prettier shelter magazines. Piper makes “artisanal soap” that is “carried at Barneys.” Larry writes. They adore Mad Men. They shop at Whole Foods. What seemed, at first, like a series all about Piper’s bemused perspective on prison—in other words, a fairly pat dramedy—becomes precisely the opposite. Then, suddenly, Piper is charged with money laundering—the statute of limitations on drug offenses is 12 years, it seems—and thrown into a minimum-security prison in Connecticut with a motley crew of meth heads, murderers, and at least one transgender credit-card fraud perpetrator. Fish-out-of-water antics ensue. And all of it is based on a true story, ably set down by Piper Kerman in her 2010 memoir, from which the Netflix series takes its title. The problem is the pilot (and to a lesser degree, the second and third episodes). In order to maximize the tension between Piper and her new environment, Kohan constantly reminds us how coddled and ridiculous Piper and Larry are. She makes him promise he won’t watch Mad Men without her. They argue about a juice cleanse. She says that while she’s in the clink she’s going to “learn a craft” and “get Jackie Warner ripped,” as if jail were just another summer in Tulum. At one point she asks him to describe, over the prison phone, the groceries he has just purchased from Whole Foods. He does—the tomatoes are “engorged,” and so on—and she moans orgasmically. Unfortunately, Kohan’s initial approach has a fairly serious drawback: it makes her protagonist too much of a Sunday Styles cartoon character to care about. And so one watches, at first, out of curiosity more than anything else. After all, we aren’t often invited into a women’s minimum security prison— even on television, where the Oz version of incarceration is still the prevailing stereotype—and the anthropology of the place is fascinating. Inmates sleep on top of their made beds, never inside. Blacks socialize only with blacks; Latinas with Latinas, whites with whites. Visitors are allowed two hugs, one when arriving, one when leaving. There are none of those gloomy cellblocks you always see in the movies, just open white cubicles. Lesbians are everywhere. But subcultural tourism can only sustain a television show for so long, and Kohan is smart enough to realize it. The fourth episode of Orange is the turning point. I won’t divulge any plot points here, but as the series progresses, Kohan’s focus begins to shift from Piper to her fellow inmates—the Russian cook Red (brilliantly played by Kate Mulgrew); the Haitian lifer Miss Claudette (Michelle Hurst); the male- firefighter-turned-female-beautician Sophia (Laverne Cox); the loudmouthed addict Nicky (Natasha Lyonne)—and the show suddenly gets a lot deeper. These are not the sort of women—angry women, butch women, older women, unskinny women—we usually see on TV. We flash back to their previous lives; we learn why they’re locked up; and we begin to realize, just as Piper eventually does, that our nice blonde protagonist is “no different than anyone else in here.” Basically, they all “made bad choices.” What seemed, at first, like a series all about Piper Chapman’s bemused perspective on prison—in other words, a fairly pat dramedy—becomes precisely the opposite: a series that encompasses many clashing perspectives, and shows how they’re all, in some elemental way, the same. Turns out bingeing isn’t only good for watching the shows you’re already addicted to. It’s also a good way to make sure you don’t miss out on the shows you should be addicted to next. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/07/11/you-ve-gotta-binge-on-the-new-netflix-series-orange- is-the-new-black.html Netflix’s ‘Orange Is the New Black’: Brilliance behind bars July 11, 2013 By Hank Stuever
Two summers ago, I took the train from Washington to Staunton, Va., to go to a wedding. The woman sitting next to me was from Maine, and she was on her way to report for a relatively short prison sentence (her crime was embezzlement, I seem to recall), at the same federal prison in West Virginia “where Martha Stewart went,” she bragged, the way freshmen talk about their college choices. Once in a while, I wonder how it all worked out for her. If you know anything about the American penal system, then you know it was probably not the calm retreat she had hoped for. As made perfectly clear in Jenji Kohan’s magnificent and thoroughly engrossing new series, “Orange Is the New Black” (available for streaming on Netflix), prison is still the pits. But it is also filled with the entire range of human emotion and stories, all of which are brought vividly to life in a world where a stick of gum could ignite either a romance or a death threat. Based on Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name, the series follows a fresh-faced woman from Brooklyn (she’s launching a line of artisanal lotion!) who is arrested for her connection to an international drug operation. What happened, your honor, was this: A decade ago, Piper was in a lesbian relationship and shuttled a large sum of money to Europe for her girlfriend, who worked for a cartel. Someone has named her in an indictment, and before she knows it, Piper is sentenced to 15 months in prison. “Orange Is the New Black” feels like Netflix’s first real home run since it famously entered the scripted- series biz. I realize some people couldn’t get enough of the contorted “House of Cards” this year, and that the “Arrested Development” niche is still dizzy from their group binge in May, but “Orange” is the first series in which I’d almost insist that viewers upgrade to streaming service and come along for television’s seemingly inevitable future delivery method. Kohan also created Showtime’s sprawling drug-and-fractured- family saga, “Weeds,” and “Orange Is the New Black” has some of that same comi-tragic feel to it, with a whole lot more depth. Once Piper (Taylor Schilling, doing a perfectly naive little bird) is behind bars, we are introduced to a harsh yet complex array of female characters. Having bid her boyfriend Larry (Jason Biggs) a tearful goodbye (“Promise you’re not watching ‘Mad Men’ without me,” she begs him, later), Piper quickly wises up and learns to navigate the distrustful exchanges that form her new life. She’s completely thrown to discover that one of the inmates in her wing is the ex-girlfriend (“That ’70s Show’s” Laura Prepon) who got her in all this trouble to begin with. Watching the show, one begins to realize that all the good parts for women truly have been kept locked up somewhere; now, here they all are, free (in at least one sense) to be portrayed. Within the first six episodes, they are expertly and fully sketched, textured and realized: Latinas, lesbians, an activist nun, a fireman who transitioned into a woman, a housekeeper-turned-murderer, a Russian inmate (Kate Mulgrew) who runs the kitchen and serves Piper a used-tampon sandwich out of initial spite. (Warning: The show is full of gross and intentionally unsettling moments; it is a prison, after all. With any luck, the sandwich will be the worst of it.) Together, these women and their stories form a sad and strange tapestry, but “Orange Is the New Black” is by no means a female “Oz.” And although there are unwanted advances from unctuous guards (including Pablo Schreiber as Officer Mendez, a.k.a. “Pornstache”), it has little use for our culture’s exploitative and outdated “Caged Heat”-style excitement for the notion of women doing time together. As in “Weeds,” Kohan and her writers are obsessed with the million little details that form a believable and unembellished realm. Each episode contains fascinating revelations about the prison world, almost like a documentary report from within. http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/netflixs-orange-is-the-new-black-brilliance-behind- bars/2013/07/11/d52f911e-e9aa-11e2-8f22-de4bd2a2bd39_story.html
The awesome, original “Orange Is the New Black” The Netflix show is explicitly about the consequences of breaking bad, but never glorifies it July 11, 2013 By Willa Paskin “Orange Is the New Black,” Netflix’s hilarious, addictive, fantastic new series about the goings-on at a low-security women’s prison, is available in its entirety right now on the streaming service, which presents a problem. I want to tell you how much you should go and watch it, but I am in a hurry to get back to watching it myself, because watching “Orange Is the New Black” is all I want to do. When I finish all 13 episodes, I suspect it will still be all I want to do. It’s that good. “Orange Is the New Black”— which I will henceforth refer to as “Orange” because “OITNB” looks like the name of a boy band— stars Taylor Schilling as Piper Chapman, a Smith graduate who once transported a large quantity of drug money for her then-girlfriend, a sexy high-end heroin importer named Alex (“That 70s Show’s” Laura Prepon, who has never been close to this good in anything else). A decade later, Piper is ensconced in the full bougie Brooklyn, N.Y., lifestyle. She’s engaged to a writer named Larry (Jason Biggs) and starting an artisanal soap company with her best friend Polly — Barneys just agreed to carry the line — when she finally gets busted, pleads out, and is sentenced to 15 months at Litchfield women’s correctional institute, where Alex is also serving her time. Piper does not, as her WASPy mother so indelicately and wrongheadedly puts it, “belong” in this sort of place: She’s white, affluent, college-educated. Piper immediately benefits from her difference — the prison caseworker sees in her someone he can “communicate” with — but also begins to unravel. She is the kind of woman who is used to having problems go away by telling the truth and saying sorry — doing what your mom told you to do on the playground — but that sort of touchy-feely stuff won’t work in a place where, as Piper’s commanding roommate later puts it, “they don’t believe the truth.” But “Orange,” created by Jenji Kohan of “Weeds” and based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, is not just a story about how a privileged white girl learns to tough it out, or a story about how a privileged white girl really is just like everybody else. The show has way too much respect and affection for all of its other characters to be either so condescending or idiotically p.c. (In the biggest story line misstep, Piper is denied food in prison while the show flashes back to the time she went on a seven-day juice cleanse: It’s the series’ most on-the-nose moment.) There are dozens of other inmates at Litchfield, of all races and ages, and each episode focuses on one in particular, filling out her back story and the series of predicaments and bad decisions that led to her sentence. There’s a fierce Russian cook, a very dry ex-junkie played by Natasha Lyonne, a highly dysfunctional mother-daughter duo, a chola obsessed with the Smiths, a transgendered former fireman, a crazy Jesus freak, a nun and many, many more. If “Orange” can be accused of anything, it’s of being almost universally sympathetic to this diverse, uproarious, fierce group of distinctive women: They may be in prison, but the only sociopath on this show is one of the guards (Pablo Schreiber, playing a creep named Pornstache). Without ever being anything less than wildly entertaining, “Orange” is effortlessly in conversation with all of TV’s biggest themes, and, boy, does it have something new to say about every single one of them. Here is a show that is explicitly about the consequences of breaking bad, but that never glorifies it: Violating the law does not for one moment seem cool, just a bad choice that gets you locked up. By virtue of its almost entirely female cast, it’s an instant retort to the macho-man craze, proof positive that female dynamics are more than interesting enough to build a show around, whether they be romantic, maternal, familial or tribal. It stars a white girl, but in its racial diversity and frank acknowledgment of racial issues is a lesson to every show that does not address these subjects as a matter of course. There’s a scene where the camera hops around the cafeteria from the white table to the black table to the Hispanic table (prison is a lot like high school), with each group being more racist than the last. It’s probably the sharpest, funniest racial bit I’ve seen on TV since “The Chappelle Show.” “Orange” is expansive, moving, crazy fun. It is so much these things that you may not even notice that it has hopped right out of some of quality TV’s most staid, boring cul-de-sacs, tossing over the fetishization of violence and the antihero and his hyper-heterosexuality for something new, complicated, really female, really gay and really delightful. It’s a great show — I’m going back to watching now. http://www.salon.com/2013/07/12/the_awesome_original_orange_is_the_new_black/singleton/
Orange Is the New Black: 7 Reasons You Should Binge Watch Right Now July 11, 2013 By Kristin Dos Santos Laura Prepon making out with another girl in a shower. The opening scene for Orange Is the New Black is pretty attention-grabbing to say the least, but it's the raw emotion, gut-punching performances and laugh-out-loud humor of this new Netflix series that will keep you superglued to your seat for all 13 episodes. Netflix has just released the entire first season, from Weeds creator Jenji Kohan (and based on a memoir from Piper Kerman) about a sweet, blond, girl next door (Taylor Schilling) who gets sentenced to prison, thanks to her former lesbian lover/drug smuggler (Prepon) selling her out. And here are seven reasons you should stream all episodes right now: 1. It's Sort of Like Weeds 2.0. but, Dare We Say, Better? Like Kohan's previous Showtime hit starring Mary-Louise Parker, Orange centers on a deeply relatable girl next door who gets catapulted into a world surrounded by criminals. And? "They're both hot," Kohan points out. "What attracts me is how they walked that line and the push-pull between those sides of them," Kohan says of Weeds and Orange's leading ladies. "The side to be the good girl and the part of them that wants to be the rebel and feel that excitement and escape their stereotype." 2. Taylor Schilling Is All Kinds of Awesome: As Piper, a "former lesbian" who once carried a single bag of drugs for her lover (Prepon), Schilling is grippingly real and relatable. So how would the 28-year-old actress fare in real life in a real prison? "I think I would probably be eaten alive," Schilling quips, adding that she was a big fan of Jenji Kohan's past work and "was willing to do anything to be a part of [Orange]." 3. Jason Biggs Gives Good Cry: Who knew the dude has such emotional depth? Biggs stars as the fiancé of the show's main character, Piper (Shilling), and their relationship is so simultaneously charming and tortured, you'll find yourself laugh-crying at least once during the first episode. The beach proposal scene and the goodbye at the prison? All. The. Tears. 4. Did Somebody Say Diversity? It is prison, and Orange's cast is incredibly diverse. "I love that our way in was this kind of yuppie white girl story," Jenji explains. "Because if you go to a network and you say, ‘I want to talk about Latinos and blacks and their prison experience and the cycle of poverty,' it's not going to be a big sale. [But we] can kind of write in on Piper, and then expand the world and tell everyone's story. It's a great Trojan horse to a certain extent." 5. Amazing One-Liners: Like Piper's fiancé's parting words to her: "Please be brave. Don't let anyone into your granny panties." Or his words when he found out her crime: "I feel like I'm in a Borne movie. Have you killed?" These moments of dark humor bring levity to what could otherwise by a wholly depressing show, based on the premise. Ditto the awesome cultural references to things like Toddlers and Tiaras and Taylor Swift . 6. Plot Twists: Let's just say you won't see them coming. 7. You Don't Have to Be Scared to Commit: Orange is staying with you. No really, this show is in it for the long haul! Netflix already put a ring on it, and announced a second season before season one even premiered because, as Kohan points out, "Netflix has balls. They were just like, ‘We like it. We believe in it. We're going to pick it up,' and I'm just grateful." And though Piper's prison sentence is for only 15 months, Kohan isn't concerned. "It's going on forever. As long as they'll have us, I feel confident that we can stretch this s--t out forever. As long as we're interested in these characters and the stories, it's prison. We can make the rules." There are plenty more reasons...like Jodie Foster directing! But we'll leave more surprises for you to discover. Orange Is the New Black is on Netflix right now. Happy streaming. http://www.eonline.com/news/438353/orange-is-the-new-black-7-reasons-you-should-binge-watch- right-now