Emmy Spotlight: Orange is the New Black

Did you know that it’s the first season of Orange is the New Black that is in contention at this year’s Emmy ceremony? I sure didn’t. So go ahead and check out my absurdly belated review of season two that I totally didn’t write by accident after you finish up here. And now, let’s all reach back in our minds, to that desolate wasteland in our collective memory known as “summer 2013,” which is when the first season of Orange is the New Black aired before it was then summarily ignored by that year’s Emmys because eligibility windows.

The first season of Orange is the New Black is a solid dramedy. It’s pretty hard at this point not to look at it comparison to the second (and I think superior) season, but I’ll try my best. What I love most about it, which I briefly touched on in my piece on season two, is that the show is a total Trojan horse. On its face it appears to be yet another show about a privileged white lady, in over her head, even more so considering it’s from Jenji Kohan, who gave us Weeds. But like that show (which I’ll argue forever is great), Orange has a much different, better, and more interesting agenda. For while Piper is certainly our entry point into the crazy world of Litchfield, it becomes evident very quickly that Kohan and company are much more interested in the characters that inhabit the prison, and in the ways that they cope with life behind bars. It’s a wonderful bait and switch, and the result is a television show that features one of the most diverse, inclusive casts in the history of the medium.

It’s not all bait and switch, of course. The premiere episode especially is heavily focused on Piper, as it slowly transitions the audience from her comfortable upper-class existence into the harsh realities of prison life. Appropriately titled “I Wasn’t Ready,” the episode also firmly establishes the flashback structure, most reminiscent of a show like Lost, that enables the series to explore its characters in such impressive depth. While at first this exploration is reserved for Piper, it quickly extends outward. At first the characters appear to Piper, and therefore to us, as clichés. But slowly, as Piper gets to know both them and the prison better, we see that each is a complex, well-rounded individual.

It says something about how well the rest of the season does its job that, in re-watching “I Wasn’t Ready,” Piper comes across as, frankly, grating. Similarly, the other characters come across as flat and one-note, especially as they’re introduced with their specific roles within the prison. One of the biggest benefits of the Netflix model is that we don’t need to wait thirteen or more weeks for the shading to be filled in, as we would with a typical television show. Instead, the rough sketches presented here are fleshed out as quickly as our eyes will allow.

The show grows exponentially throughout the season, and the retrospective strangeness of the premiere suddenly seems all of a piece with the story the show is trying to tell. Insofar as the season is about Piper’s journey, then, it’s quite successful. But it’s most successful in telling the stories of the other inmates. Kate Mulgrew is a standout as Red, who runs the kitchen and makes Piper’s life hell before becoming a valuable ally. On the outside Red was herself an outsider, starved for the attention of the wives of the Russian mobsters, until she falls in with the crowd herself. Laverne Cox is excellent in a small role as Sophia, a transgender woman who committed credit card fraud to finance her surgery. And Taryn Manning gives a frequently genuinely frightening turn as Pennsatucky, an under-educated meth head in for the murder of a worker at an abortion clinic. But even the background roles, tertiary characters who might not have much bearing on the plot, but who add depth and color to the setting of the show, are memorable and even moving. Morello, Jones, Big Boo, Taystee, Poussey, and on and on—slowly but surely, nearly every single inmate becomes a living, breathing character.

It’s somewhat disappointing, then, how heavily the season leans on Piper and Alex. It’s not that Laura Prepon is bad in the role—in fact, she’s the better of the season’s several antagonists, since her preexisting connection with Piper raises the stakes for both Piper and the audience. But with so much else going on at the prison, it can sometimes be a drag to spend so much time with arguably one of the least interesting characters, or at least, the most familiar. There isn’t very much left to learn about Piper, whereas we as an audience are seeing someone like Red, or Sophia, or Miss Claudette, for the first time. What we do learn about Piper is how she is changed by these women, and by her new circumstances; everything we learn, we learn through contrast to these other elements.

I think part of my discomfort with the focus on Piper is also the relative lack of an overarching story, one that connects the many, many disparate threads of the season. (I’m cheating slightly by noting that season two goes a long way to fixing this, by way of introducing Vee, but hey—it does.) Pablo Schreiber’s Mendez rounds out the villains of season one, and his dealings with Daya and Tricia do bring in many of the other supporting characters, but Piper and Pennsatucky’s ultimate showdown feels very separate from much of the show, just as the rest of the show at times can feel very separate from Piper. Curiously, even though Piper is one of the few characters in season two who doesn’t interact directly with Vee, that sense of her as just another inmate actually makes the character feel more integrated into the show.

It’s important to remember, though, that these episodes can be watched straight through in a handful of sittings (if not just one), and in many ways they are meant to be taken more as a whole than they are as a series of thirteen separate stories. Taken as such, the season becomes an examination of morality, in a sense, of the way that decisions long forgotten, or tiny indiscretions thought unnoticed, can suddenly dominate our lives. Laura Prepon plays Alex as a toxic presence throughout Piper’s life, one that simply won’t go away, while scenes with Larry and his parents create an ever larger gap between what Piper was and what she is now. Running through all of that is Pennsatucky, with her brand of pure, unbridled chaos. As for everyone else, they fall somewhere along the spectrum, each their own special shade of grey, whether we’re talking Bennett, the well-intentioned fool, or Fig, who emerges by the end of the season as a devious administrator, or Piper herself, a spoiled white girl who maybe is learning to be less so. (As an aside, Alysia Reiner is absolutely fabulous as Natalie Figueroa, always striking the perfect balance of no-nonsense and heinous bitch.)

When we get to the end of the season, Piper is pummeling the life out of Pennsatucky, and it’s a moment that is appropriately horrifying, and yet in a way also liberating. It’s Piper embracing prison life for all that it entails, her sign to herself that yes, she is ready. And we have Healy, who leaves Piper to die. And we have Red, down a peg, having lost her kitchen and with it her status in the prison. Perhaps it is most fitting, then, to view this first season as a collection of different stories, united by their common themes, and by their common setting. Funnily enough, the comparisons to Lost don’t seem to end with the structural similarities; there’s something to be said for the idea that Litchfield, as a closed system, is a space for the inmates, and the COs as well, to confront their own worst demons, whether they reside in their pasts or in their present.

In closing, then, I want to especially call out the Christmas pageant that closes out the season in “Can’t Fix Crazy”. The entire sequence is wonderfully incongruous, breathtaking in its simplicity and in its beauty. When Norma breaks the silence caused by Suzanne’s forgotten lines, with her surprisingly gorgeous voice, the moment catches you off guard in the best possible way, precisely because it is so unexpected to see anything even remotely resembling unbridled joy up on that stage.

The incongruity carries into Piper and Pennsatucky’s shiv duel out back, and I think it’s worth noting that when Piper does finally snap, it’s at Pennsatucky’s insistence that she is unworthy of God’s love, of anyone’s love at all. That exact fear has nagged at the back of Piper’s mind all season, but really, it’s the same fear that plagues every single character on the show, whether inmate or guard or administrator. For whatever reasons—the reasons don’t ultimately matter—the various residents of Litchfield are afraid that they are unworthy of love. And so the best thing about Orange is the New Black is not only its expanding scope, but its insistence on revealing these people for the human beings that they are. It’s highly entertaining and often funny, but it’s also piercing commentary on our prison system, on the way that we as a country systematically and institutionally devalue inmates who, really, have the same problems any of us has. Orange is the New Black is about finding commonality where one least expects it—commonality between inmates and free folk, between black and white, rich and poor, and any other divisive binary you can dream up. The characters and setting might be new to television, but themes aren’t, and it’s that universality that makes the show so very effective, and which has so quickly cemented it in the cultural zeitgeist. And the best thing about considering this first season on such a delay? We already know the show only gets better from here.