There’s no show like Orange Is the New Black -- that much is clear. From theme to tone to structure to diversity to just about any other metric, the Jenji Kohan-created Netflix flagship encapsulates the very concept of originality.
Kohan is a reckless writer, and I mean that in a (mostly) good way. As her stint on the equally-groundbreaking Weeds made clear, here’s a writer unafraid to literally blow up her work and start from scratch. As an artist she is confidently defiant, effervescently original and unconventionally pure. Her voice is her own; more to the point, there's a distinctiveness to her words and characters that feels as specific and vibrant as the work of contemporary TV greats like David Milch, Aaron Sorkin or David Simon. As a publicly-identifiable showrunner for over a decade now, her work fits into that category one might call “essential.”
Which is why, for any close observer of Kohan’s (or TV in general), the third season of Orange Is the New Black promised to be a fascinating ride.
The hour-long’s first season snuck up on just about everybody. Its conceit was to introduce audiences to the complex and misunderstood world of women’s prison via Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), an upper-middle-class danger-seeker whose “liberal” worldview principally concerns organic foods, TED Talks and Bush-bashing. We see her fellow inmates as she initially does: stereotypically. There’s “Crazy Eyes” (Uzo Aduba), the loony outcast who quickly becomes obsessed with Piper. There’s the line of Latina women comically rolling off Oh My Gods as brain-dead and monotonously as a bad SNL skit. Most significantly, there’s that sense of entitled isolation -- like among this group of racially-diverse criminals, progressive, good-hearted Piper simply doesn’t belong.
In this regard, Kohan’s trick was a brilliant one. Gradually shifting the point-of-view away from Piper and onto other characters, she drew the world with slowly-emerging depth and authenticity. As a clever flashback structure -- in which roughly every episode, a different inmate’s backstory parallels the present-day action in Litchfield Penitentiary -- made clear, these were people. This fleshing-out was handled so subtly and so naturally that when, in the season finale, Piper’s fiance Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs) described the inmates on a radio show as they’d initially been described to him, the characterizations came off not only as offensive, but misplaced. He was so wrong -- it’s not “Crazy Eyes”! It’s Suzanne! -- that Piper herself had to confront her grossly elitist perspective upon entering the prison.
That kind of structure was sneakily brilliant for a first season, but how would Kohan push forward? In a surprise move, the second run was framed around the introduction of a seasonal Big Bad -- a cable drama trope that’s defined the runs of The Sopranos, Justified, Damages, Dexter and countless others -- in Vee (Lorraine Toussaint). It didn’t feel quite right as an ongoing template for Orange, but it made for a frighteningly compelling and intriguingly sociological chapter of the show. (It remains its best season.) Kohan dug into ideas of aging, agency, and racial solidarity and grouping; within the confines of the show’s setting and ideas, it worked tremendously well.
All of this background means to say that Kohan began drafting season three of Orange without a workable seasonal roadmap in place. The third season, as was the case with Weeds, would be her greatest challenge.
Having watched all 13 episodes, I think Kohan took the right approach. Essentially, she’s whittled Orange down to its purest form. The third season is a collection of mini-arcs, relying on the show’s entrenched arsenal of strengths -- mainly, a ridiculously dense (and diverse) cast of three-dimensional characters -- to make them pop. Characters bounce off of one another unexpectedly and powerfully; each has such a fluid existence within the show that they’re constantly being explored and dissected from different angles. Without the ambitious construction of the preceding seasons, this new run of episodes is defined by Orange’s core characters and their completely unique, sometimes funny, often poignant and frequently surprising journeys.
There remains a structural center, though, and for the first time it’s less a person (Piper, Vee) than an idea. After taking over the prison at the end of last season, Assistant Warden Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) is quickly informed of the prison’s pending closure. What saves it? You can sense Kohan grinning as she teases the answer in the season’s third episode: privatization. Episode by episode, the company that takes over Litchfield takes a little more humanity out of it. First, it’s the formation of a quasi-sweatshop; then the replacement of “freshly”-made meals with bags of whatever-the-fuck; and finally, as the season’s final image heartbreakingly teases, the installation of bunk-beds. (In other words, same amount of space but twice the prisoners. Profit!) Practically every cost-cutting decision the prison makes informs what happens to our characters this season, from the quick introduction of unprepared guards all the way down to the irresponsible doctor they’ve replaced the old, and presumably better, one with.
Vee was a complex figure to orbit a season’s worth of plots and ideas around, and it’s safe to say that with the idea of privatization, Kohan reorients toward a more obvious target. Her digs and plot points feel easier and less earned than before. She flimsily tries to complicate the proceedings by introducing a Company Man who doesn’t really believe in it all, played inconsistently by comedian Mike Birbiglia, as the owners’ on-the-ground man. Time is spent on him battling his father, the head of the company, over the worthiness of decency and the responsibilities of running a prison; his father and the company itself, meanwhile, are beyond soulless, with board meetings progressing like Bernie Sanders’ worst nightmare. It’s all very blunt and clear and direct. But even though the storyline itself is devoid of substantial dramatic intrigue, the way the company’s actions so peripherally, or in some cases so linearly, dictate what happens to Litchfield’s inmates (and even employees) is superbly executed.
In the season premiere “Mothers’ Day,” Piper reunites with her on-again-off-again affair, Alex (Laura Prepon). Normally sexy and vivacious and confident, she’s returned to the prison a shell of her former self. She tells Piper, “I’m a fly on the wall of the prison-industrial complex,” which while a tad overt for my taste nicely lays out the season’s thematic path. Piper responds sympathetically, “You got caught up in the system.” They’re wrestling with the idea of what prison does to you. And throughout this third season of Orange Is the New Black, that idea is disturbingly and passionately dichotomized. The incarcerated women’s expectation of respect and right to free will is steadily stripped by the prison’s new handlers. Here are the pawns, then, in the game of corporate overlords. There’s the inside and the outside, and never in Kohan’s vision has the difference been so visible.
The consequence of this is a collection of beautifully-realized small stories that converge and splinter with free-flowing realism -- but that’s the trade-off for the few that don’t land so richly. Piper gives into her dark side as she hadn’t before, going sociopathic in her formation of a complex crime network. (Which, cleverly, emerges out of the prison’s newly-formed panties sweatshop.) The show is always aware of her pitch-black turn, with Alex going so far as to attack her sense of decency for “firing” certain disenfranchised members of her syndicate for the purposes of establishing a reputation. Even still, the absence of nuance in this seasonal arc is consistently distracting. It’s comparable to the dehuminization of Nancy Botwin in Kohan’s Weeds, but as the unfulfilled widow and mother of two, her “breaking bad” was always rooted in something engagingly empathetic. Piper’s history isn’t quite so complex; she may be a well-drawn character, and be played by an exceptionally talented actress in Ms. Schilling, but there’s an uninviting monotony to her moral descension. Kohan never quite reverses course on that count.
There are other elements to the season that don’t quite work, including an increased focus on the hapless guards and their desire to unionize, and the episodes themselves lack centrality given the smaller nature of the narrative. Holistically, in fact, this is probably Orange’s weakest season, or at least its most uneven. But Kohan’s greatest strength -- her ability to craft honest, funny, touching characters and send them in various directions -- has never been more fully on-display. Having rendered dozens of characters both familiar and connective through two seasons, Kohan freely challenges them -- and us -- in season three by paralleling their backgrounds and personalities with the effects of the aforementioned “system.” What we see is an obsession among many inmates to find faith, or something to believe in, or some way to grant themselves a chance at personal redemption. We see the self-loathing of two very different parents, in Gloria (the great Selenis Leyva) and Sophia (Laverne Cox) -- established out of their struggle from behind bars to raise their children and watch them grow up -- transform into a bitter rivalry and finally into an ugly hate crime. We see Alex’s paranoia -- that her old crime boss is out to get her -- spread among several inmates, the system all but forcing them to believe that they’re under constant threat and constant surveillance. We see outcasts from completely different walks of life, in the hick-ish Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning) and self-described unapologetic “dyke” Big Boo (Lea DeLaria), come together and form an intensely emotional bond.
Some of these stories are told humorously, like Cindy’s (Adrienne C. Moore) conversion to Judaism or Suzanne’s erotic serial that takes the whole prison by storm, but they finish up denser and more affecting than you have any right to expect. Others take a tragic turn, like a perverse guard’s rape of Pennsatucky, before Kohan spins them into tender tales of hope and personal strength. As the season is so pared down in the chronicling of these women’s journeys, the flashbacks also emerge as more intrinsic to the show’s success than ever before. They determine the emotional pull of specific episodes; more impressively, innocuous details from episodes past come to inform later flashbacks, and vice-versa. A lot of these characters appear to be “losing their minds,” so to speak. But through the textured understanding we have of so many of them, their spiraling is kept in perspective and their stories remain resonant.
In form, Orange Is the New Black plays like a funky, jubilant ode to its subjects. For the most part, the women who inhabit the show are realized through an endeared, even adored lens. Kohan makes no excuses for that. She holds an ability like I’ve never seen, to draw a seemingly limitless set of characters, each more varied in mannerism, in speech and in worldview than the last. Her show can feel ill-suited to the hour-long model, but then again, she has so much stuff to say and so many ideas to explore that 13 hours seems the bare minimum -- seriously, I didn’t have room to mention, let alone engage with, the sweeter-than-sugar flirtation between Healey (Michael J. Harney) and Red (Kate Mulgrew), or Lorna’s (Yael Stone) riotous quest to find a man, or that marvelously strange episode dedicated to the “invisible” Chang. But that’s the show’s consummate power. It touches so many communities and perspectives, and observes them with equal parts respect and playfulness.
And yet there’s an ache to this series, a tragic undercurrent that seems ready to overpower at any second. This season starkly separates and then sparsely integrates the warmness of the individual stories with the bleakness of what goes on beyond them. Its ending, then -- a stunning celebration of womanhood, of freedom and of collective identity -- is thus rightly checked by such reality. As the women of Litchfield bask in their moment of breaking free, Kohan cuts to the inside: in come the bunk beds, and the lines of expressionless new inmates preparing to take up residence with those we’ve come to know. It’s a blistering commentary on our system, on what we’ve come to value and prioritize.
But this is also a series of hope and faith. We may have once, in other words, seen these prisoners coming in droves as one in the same. But we know better now. We know they all have a story. And so while the world of Litchfield -- or more accurately, of our whole dysfunctional way of doing things -- has just gotten a little darker, Kohan has made good on her promise to expand in her sweeping, definite expression of humanity.
Because every one of those women has a story to tell. And I, for one, can’t wait to hear them.
Because every one of those women has a story to tell. And I, for one, can’t wait to hear them.
Grade: B+