Orange Is the New Black
Created by Jenji Kohan
Netflix
THE FACT that the incarceration rate for black men is six times the rate for white men in the U.S. is no laughing matter. The idea of a bisexual blonde dressed in an orange jumpsuit and locked up in a largely lesbian women’s prison is a whole lot funnier. Especially if that woman is a Whole Foods-shopping WASP named Piper and she’s serving a 15-month sentence for smuggling drug money for a former girlfriend. That, at least, is the comic premise of Orange is the New Black, which stars Taylor Schilling as Piper Chapman, Laura Prepon as her ex-girlfriend Alex (doing time in the same New York clinker), and Jason Biggs (American Pie) as Piper’s fiancé Larry. At one point, the sultry-voiced Prepon (from That 70s Show) boasts to Piper: “I’m good at moving large amounts of heroin.”
But Piper, Alex, and Larry are a fairly conservative trio compared to the other characters—a transsexual hairdresser, a tattooed bull dyke, and a guard with a prosthetic leg—that populate the prison and make this the outstanding ensemble dramedy it is. It’s also deft at seesawing between the serious and the silly. In the words of Yoga Jones, whose sinewy arms the other inmates lust after, “I’m telling you that surviving here is all about perspective … and don’t eat the pudding.” From the Emmy-winning creators of Weeds (the one about the soccer mom turned pot dealer), Orange Is the New Black has been described as The L Word meets Oz, and while that’s an apt description, the chief correctional officer tells Piper in the series pilot: “This isn’t Oz. Women fight with gossip and rumors.” They also fiercely protect each other, and the series feels fresh because it chronicles a diverse community of women (black, white, Latina, et al.). It’s something that only Netflix—the erstwhile DVD-rental distributor now competing with HBO and AMC as a producer of original programming—could pull off. The episode titles are face-slappers like “Tit Punch,” “Fucksgiving,” and “Lesbian Request Denied,” the last of which was directed by Oscar-winner Jodie Foster. At the center of the action is Sophia Burset, the sassy transsexual who flaunts her duct-tape sandals in the showers and cuts a lock of Piper’s hair to make a weave. Foster gives us a scene from Sophia’s past in which his wife Crystal helps to dress him in women’s clothing, saying: “I can’t have my husband walking around like a two-dollar hooker.” Crystal begs her husband not to undergo full gender reassignment surgery just as their young son walks in on them. Confused and angered by the sight of his parents’ gender-bending embrace, he runs off. The flashback is brief but affecting. It’s also proof that Orange Is the New Black is just as adept at exploiting the messiness of race, class, sexuality, and penal life as it is at capturing these complexities of the modern American family. But the series is also a politically conscious one that asks important questions about the role of mass incarceration in America. Is jail, for the 1.6 million presently behind bars, a place of social exile or rehabilitation? Piper Kerman, whose 2010 memoir served as the basis for the series, has said: “We have the biggest prison population in the world and really in human history. … [T]he stories that are hidden behind prison walls are very different than people’s assumptions.” Kerman makes a point of creating a back story for all of the characters, and each is more compelling than the last. The first season effectively mapped out a matriarchy ruled by a red-headed Russian cook who runs the cafeteria and protects her girls from the guards’ sexual demands. Compared to HBO’s Oz and MSNBC’s Lockup franchise, Orange Is the New Black is surprisingly nonviolent. But when a fight does break out in the season’s final episode, it’s as rough as it is unrelenting. That Piper is the violent aggressor is perhaps the show’s darkest insight to date, and one that the writers should develop in episodes to come. To see a piping-mad Chapman pummel a Bible-banging cellmate suggests that “bad” people aren’t born that way but are instead made, conditioned, hardened. One of Piper’s gang might put it in simpler terms: it’s the environment, stupid. Colin Carman, PhD, recently joined the English faculty at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, CO.
