There are a few things about Orange is the New Black that I’ve seen on TV before. The lead is a “nice blond lady,” gossipy cliques of women are the center of the drama, flashback sequences are dispensed more liberally than whiskey on Mad Men, and everyone’s stuck together in a Sartre-esque situation that just begs for chaos.
But instead of being marooned on an island in another dimension or even just a local high school, the ladies of Orange are in prison, which is both what you might expect and what you entirely don’t. There will be power plays, there will be racial tension, and there will most certainly be lesbians, but what’s striking about the show is not so much the inclusion of those elements as the way they are presented.
While based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, Orange is really the brainchild of Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, who is no stranger to telling stories about upper-middle-class white women and their shocking illegal activities. Though her principal source material remains Kerman’s personal tale, she deftly avoids becoming trapped within that narrow perspective, dedicating most episodes to exploring the backstory of a new character alongside the everyday drama of incarceration, Lost-style.
The show clearly originates with Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) as its wide-eyed, WASPy protagonist, but it gradually expands outward to embrace the stories of the other inmates.
Combine that approach with punchy dialogue and a willingness to touch on hot-button topics like race, sexuality, and the legal system in a way that doesn’t scream “After School Special” and you have yourself a series of remarkable freshness. Hardly free of flaws, however, Orange has a fondness for melodrama as the writers attempt to drive the plot forward, as well as a tendency to lean on clichés in some of its character portrayals.
Many critics emphatically celebrate the sheer amount of—brace yourselves, admissions officers—diversity in the cast, whose notable members include a black transsexual (Laverne Cox) and a Russian queen bee chef (Kate Mulgrew). There are women of every race, sexual orientation, and body type that are so rare to see on cable they’re practically black pearls. (Orange is a Netflix original series).
On the other hand, whenever any much-needed diversity shows up in entertainment, it can also be easy to swoop down and harp upon any failure to include every voice with equal concentration and accuracy. Orange has been criticized for not featuring black women with varying sexual orientations and for indulging in cartoonish stereotypes. (There’s an evangelical hick of the clinging-to-guns-and-religion variety and quite a few sassy, finger-snapping black ladies.)
While there is some obvious legitimacy to these critiques, however, it’s impossible not to recognize what a brave new world Orange represents in its willingness to tell these women’s stories at all. Though it may occasionally use two-dimensional conventions as crutches, it atones for those weaknesses through the engaging backstories of those characters that might otherwise simply provide comic fodder for prison life.
It’s not the duty of a show to represent everyone, but Orange takes a great leap forward in those stories it does manage to introduce in the 13 episodes of its first season. Above all else, it is a show about women, particularly those that are so easily misunderstood and written off by society. In fact, it reminds me of another show focused on women and which received a similar amount of both celebration and backlash when it first emerged.
Much like Lena Dunham’s Girls, Orange begins with a privileged white woman in an unfamiliar situation; while Dunham’s Hannah is drifting through her postgrad New York life, Schilling’s Piper is leaving her idyllic yuppie existence of juice-cleansing and making artisanal soaps to surrender herself at the local prison.
Both characters are comically shameless narcissists and neither has any idea what’s in for them, yet the shows that revolve around them become so much richer as they evolve to be less about their central characters’ individual struggles and more about the relationships that sustain them. Both characters are practically human memes of Stuff White People Like, but they prove to be much more complex than the stereotypes of the social stratum that previously harbored them.
When Lena Dunham accepted the Emmy for Best Actress in a TV series, she said that the award was for any woman who had ever felt like there wasn’t a space for her. I think it’s fair to say that Orange is the New Black is honoring that tradition by continuing to make room.
