I guess it’s supposed to be winkingly ironic, or maybe even progressive, that immigrant characters coded as poor or working-class reference “open-plan architecture” and “mixed-media sculpture,” but for me it only underscored the lack of diversity in the show’s writers’ room. Worse, the writers tend to write the same kinds of jokes and give the same points of references to a huge swath of the characters, no matter their background or level of assimilation. The show’s humor is key to its appeal, but in the weaker midseason episodes, it can feel like spoonfuls of sugar to make the pedantic bitterness go down.
But the efforts to leaven the tone as things get worse for the inmates feel even more grating than in previous seasons. OITNB’s writers deftly handle many of the character developments alongside the nauseating realities of mass incarceration. Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. (Caputo’s reckoning with his sexual harassment of an ex-employee feels a bit like the show grappling with its own earlier miscalculations.) But the two most wrenching moments belong to the ICE storylines, in which freed convict Maritza (Diane Guerrero) gets caught up in a demonstrably worse system than prison, and a new character, Karla (Karina Arroyave), exemplifies some of the most unjust plights of our current border horrors. Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), Maria (Jessica Pimentel), and former warden Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) are confronted with new ways of thinking about their pasts. Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) watches the two most important people in her life-her surrogate mom Red (Kate Mulgrew) and her ex-girlfriend Lorna (Yael Stone)-fall apart without adequate medical care. The life sentences that Taystee (series standout Danielle Brooks) and Daya (Dascha Polanco) received for their purported roles in the prison riot send them on wildly disparate trajectories, though both involve enabling the flow of drugs into Litchfield. And even Litchfield, where corrupt correctional officers constantly weigh which laws they’re willing and unwilling to break, feels like a haven of law and order compared to the ICE detention center, where the guards can act with complete and terrifying impunity.Īfter shearing off much of the tertiary cast, Season 7 smartly focuses on the core characters, to give them the sendoffs that their backstories have primed us for. But the scenes of her at an outdoor retreat or a fancy gala give the prison-a setting we’ve grown accustomed to over seven seasons-a jarring new counterpoint. Our protagonist is, as ever, relatably annoying. Though Piper struggles to stay sober and steadily employed, the parallel release of another inmate who doesn’t have a sibling with a unused bedroom or a father who can readily give her an office job underscores Piper’s relatively fantastical luck. In fact, the show spends more time with Piper than it has since the first season, as Piper adjusts to life after incarceration and a long-distance relationship with her wife, Alex (Laura Prepon), who remains behind bars.
Season 6 ended with Piper (Taylor Schilling) released from prison, but viewers who’ve been waiting since the beginning for the show to cast its Trojan horse aside will be disappointed.
With its seventh and final season, OITNB leaves the air a pioneer that hardly any other series has caught up to-and with some of its best episodes in years. Though female protagonists have flourished on TV, recent shows celebrated for their depictions of women’s lives- Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, Fleabag, Big Little Lies-have seldom showcased diversity among women. ( One Day at a Time, at least, will resume its run on Pop TV.) But OITNB was indeed revolutionary, if far from unassailable, in its first season, when it used the Trojan horse of an upper-middle-class white blonde entering prison as a starting point to telling the stories of the types of women who seldom get to be the center of the narrative: women of color, immigrant women, queer women, poor women, older women, women with addictions, women with mental illness, women with intellectual disabilities, and so on. The recent cancellations of One Day at a Time and Tuca and Bertie-two critically acclaimed, bracingly contemporary shows-have put a dent in Netflix’s hype about itself as a different kind of network, one that prizes creative freedom above all. When Orange Is the New Black debuted in the summer of 2013, it was only Netflix’s third original series, but it became an instant standard-bearer for how streaming could revolutionize television.