Series Blog: Orange is the New Black

I’ve decided to write about new Netflix series Orange is the New Black. I’m really enjoying it so far. Although I’m not expecting the articles to be that well read. Pros/cons. First episode review is up here. Or below.

Orange Is The New Black: I wasn’t ready – Season 1, episode 1: Before she turns herself over to the prison’s officials Piper Chapman is readying her final social media missive. “So this is my last post as a free woman,” she reflects with her fiancé Larry. The night before, on the eve of her detainment, the couple make use of the “pig roasting box”. A birthday present she bought Larry, while discussing life without sex. Chapman has ‘read the books’ about how to get on behind bars; mentioning as much marks her out from her cell mates. But this isn’t a snipe at bourgeois malaise, rather the cute reference points paint a whimsical picture of her social standing.

Slightly goofish, porcelain, and sweet, Chapman is exhausted and fragile from the ordeal. But beyond the confines of the narrative – cry you’re going to jail, smile you’re engaged, be nervous you’re surrounded by hostility – there’s a companion in her. It’s an achievement that within the opening episode I can identify a friend in the central role. It is the tenderness that shines through, and makes her instantly likable.

This could be the tale of an affluent-class myopic, humbled by historic crimes as a bourgeois bohemian graduate. Recompense for thinking she could get away with flirtations with the drug trade. But it isn’t. There is no cheap moralising, graphic horror, nor easy gag. The opening episode marks out the candid assiduity with which it plans to paint prison life.

From the get-go we are shown the vulnerability of the characters. With Piper in the bathroom crying, having interrupted sex in order to wee, Larry wafts a fart from under the covers. It’s a startling moment that signposts how the show will deal with the quotidian and the personal. With humour and tragedy played against each other with ease.

Written by Piper Kerman, the show is an adaptation of her memoir; her tale of incarceration for laundering drug money. The show makes full use of the feminine spectrum, from Trans to tribal, sapphic to spiritual. We are offered a rich tapestry of characters, unearthing a world of women we seldom see.

Speaking to the L.A. Times Kerman said, “I came home in 2005, and almost every single person I knew wanted to hear about the experience in… detail. Clearly, people had this real interest in this very, very hidden universe. It’s just apparent the story had this currency that made it a good story to tell, and I was encouraged to try my hand at some writing.” With the show wrestling with detail and idiosyncrasy in equal measure there’s a surety.

The chief pleasure comes when we are taken on a satirical journey. Chapman’s path to incarceration is less a Divine Comedy, more a quirky trip. Discussions of Toms as she is handed her uniform. Talk with a nurse about her tattoo, does he like it? “I don’t like fish, I like pork, chicken, but it’s a pretty fish.” Next is the mugshot, interrupted when the camera’s USB chord requires connection. The prison guard’s authority is undermined, and the resulting picture is ungenerous. I found it refreshing for an opening episode to have the confidence to include these idiosyncratic moments. Signposting the tone with tangential dialogue.

Directed by Jenji Kohan of Weeds fame, the show contemporises Kerman’s time in prison. Here we have someone who has left behind a life of travel and a partner in Manhattan, and who now lives with a garden and thirty-something couples – talk about babies, and asinine jokes about personal grooming.

Mindful of the precariat, Orange is the New Black captures a woman more settled than Girls, one less stranded by the sub-prime market disaster. It’s about establishing the inner conflict at the heart of Chapman’s character. How she is “no longer” a lesbian, and how she will react to characters like bride-to-be Lorna Morello, who away from her groom is found tipping the velvet. All this, with her former lover and betrayer stationed in the same facility. I hope the series lives up to the plot.