Caution: This essay discusses the fourth season of Orange Is the New Black in its entirety.
The fourth season of Orange Is the New Black, the most satisfying and complex stretch of the series thus far, is unusually direct in its attempt to stake a claim in the discourse surrounding police brutality and Black Lives Matter. The sequence of episode 12, “The Animals,” is effective in part because it convinces as a nuanced dramatization of recent real-life events, or more specifically as a fictionalized parallel to the publicized murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. As Poussey begins losing consciousness in the episode, she shrieks with whatever she’s got left, “I can’t breathe.” Danielle Brooks, who plays Poussey’s best friend Taystee, told The Hollywood Reporter that, in preparing for her character’s reaction to the death, she channeled the pain exhibited by Michael Brown, Sr. as he sobbed over his son’s casket.
The fourth season of Orange Is the New Black, the most satisfying and complex stretch of the series thus far, is unusually direct in its attempt to stake a claim in the discourse surrounding police brutality and Black Lives Matter. The sequence of episode 12, “The Animals,” is effective in part because it convinces as a nuanced dramatization of recent real-life events, or more specifically as a fictionalized parallel to the publicized murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. As Poussey begins losing consciousness in the episode, she shrieks with whatever she’s got left, “I can’t breathe.” Danielle Brooks, who plays Poussey’s best friend Taystee, told The Hollywood Reporter that, in preparing for her character’s reaction to the death, she channeled the pain exhibited by Michael Brown, Sr. as he sobbed over his son’s casket.
Last year, Orange creator Jenji Kohan spearheaded a punishing institutional critique as she introduced the perils of privatization to her world, and from there the intentionality of her prescient narrative has only been made clearer.
The climax of season four has been hotly debated, however, with Black Lives Matter activists and other writers of color sharply disagreeing with the larger (and mostly white, myself included) pool of television critics who have celebrated it as layered social commentary. The season features a litany of monstrous, overtly racist guards and employees, but leaves the title of murderer to the nice guy of the group – the one who got “sucked into the system” – in the improperly trained Baxter Bayley. The question is not whether the decision to have Bayley kill Poussey is potent, or rendered with force and believability; the show rather easily checks those boxes. Rather the concern lies in its dual narrative approach. Critic Emily Nussbaum smartly described the season as a “critique of empathy,” but nonetheless, Kohan lays out a path of textured understanding in the lead-up to Bayley’s heinous act. His murder of Poussey is accidental; regrettable, even, as he’s distracted by a frantic Suzanne Warren while other inmates protest unfair treatment. Is that the Black Lives Matter story we need? And in the wake of far more blatant killings of unarmed people of color, is that the story we deserve?
It’s a thorny question to answer, because while art is hardly responsible for timely and appropriate evocations of a particular moment, or crisis, in our culture, expectations shift when the intent is clearer and the parallels are closer. Kohan is making a specific kind of deal with the audience when her tragic hero, dying without cause at the hands of an inexperienced officer, utters “I can’t breathe.” She’s intently placing a social movement just beginning to cut through popular culture at the center of her story. And this is not to say whether Orange Is the New Black fails in achieving its goal. It’s to consider how the evaluation of art changes as its political aspirations move to the fore. The spirited disagreement on that point is already in evidence.
We’ve seen a resurgence of this phenomenon taking place in sitcoms, the former domain of the typically derided “very special episode” – this past season, Black-ish and The Carmichael Show notably structured episodes around critical problems in American life – but dramas have adopted this storytelling approach as well. In Horace and Pete, Louis C.K. intermixed retro dramatics with banter focused on real events that had occurred just days before the given episode would air; American Crime threw everything at the wall that would stick in its provocative tapestry of intolerance, bullying and disenfranchisement; Mr. Robot juxtaposed a story about normalcy with one about pending revolution; and Billions dramatized our income inequality epidemic in as salacious and direct a manner as one could imagine. Even among those not set in the present: historical looks at race relations, particularly The People v. O.J. Simpson and Underground, very consciously told their stories through contemporary lenses. These are works of fiction, yes, but they’re also operating with – in aggregation – unprecedented political intent.
In part, this seems to be the natural consequence of television’s burgeoning reputation over the last decade. While HBO-style “quality TV” has been around for an entire generation now, these things – these shifts in how the medium is used and considered – don’t happen overnight. In fact, the showrunners of the aforementioned series seem uniquely – newly? – aware of the power of popular entertainment as an ideological force. I’m talking about the way hip hop music adds multiple dimensions of immediacy to Underground; how the pulpy cat-and-mouse game of Billions seems to legitimize the pessimism, even fatalism, of the have-nots without a say (or interest) in its outcome; and where the campy stylings of Ryan Murphy find a powerful mode of tragic articulation, in O.J. Simpson. Watching American Crime, as a most compelling example, I found myself wondering whether television had ever been as successfully and emotionally issue-centric.
The introduction of streaming – of millions of people simultaneously gathering around their devices as a new season of television is released – changes the function of the medium seismically. You can lay down a pointed plot point, as Orange did this year, and subsequently blow up social media for the next few weeks. Inevitably, that reality changes the way writers tell stories. That added element of prestige – combined with the consistent presence of accessibility – keeps modern television reshaping, as different creators and networks strive to strike different balances. The form has always served as a mediating cultural center, a consensus space where the conveyance of ideas and viewpoints could find their broadest audience. There’s something almost invigorating about this new crop of series, then, as they’re beginning to reassert that purpose – only with a relatively progressive bent. Indeed, this idea could extend to (among others) the feminist soap UnREAL on Lifetime and the remake of that initial cultural touchstone for the “boob tube,” History’s Roots. Politically, television is at its most thrillingly active right now.
Yet the Golden Age is in its twilight right now, and it’s worth interrogating what impact this heightened awareness has on quality. Whether or not I agree with all of these sentiments, they certainly strike a chord: that Mr. Robot is too suffocatingly anarchistic; Billions too divorced from nuance; American Crime too speechy and capital-I Important; Underground more discordant than harmonic; and on. What makes drama compelling, often, is the presence of subtlety, of natural conflict and authentic characterization. When the edge is blunted and the target’s face is taken out of the shadows, does that not – even if intentional – limit the expression? Or does it change its shape altogether?
These questions absolutely apply to the current season of Orange Is the New Black – one that features a certain mastery of construction and dramatic intelligence, but that is also, arguably, slightly troubling in its ideology. Within 24 hours of its premiere date, a fair share of the show’s audience had consumed all 13 episodes, reached its risky conclusion and gone to Twitter and Facebook to hash it all out. The back-and-forth – which has been spirited, well-argued, respectful and genuinely productive – reinforces the unique cultural capacity of television. But it’s a back-and-forth largely about intent – about what should be valued in a directly political but also deeply humanistic piece of storytelling, one that demands an engagement with its bleakly recognizable subject matter.
Television has never really been in this position before. But in the ongoing debate about what art – particularly political art – can and should be, this new trend for the industry is already yielding essential discussion and insight.