If the show no longer generates as much attention as it enjoyed in its first two or three seasons, it's likely because TV was so quick to absorb its innovations. The past five years have been defined by both a spike in scripted programming—one driven by the Netflix content factory Orange helped build—and a related boom in shows that represent marginalized communities. Now series as different as Donald Glover's virtuosic Atlanta and the hit network comedy Fresh Off the Boat, going into its sixth season, center characters of color. GLOW, a lighter dramedy about lady wrestlers from executive producer Kohan, features another big, diverse cast of women. Before Jeffrey Tambor's #MeToo problem, Transparent followed Kohan's lead in honoring every letter of LGBTQ; Pose revolves almost entirely around low-income queer and trans people of color. Nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon had a role on Orange before making history as a nonbinary character on Billions.
Considering that Orange Is the New Black has one of the largest ensembles of all the TV shows out there, the series does a great job balancing its many story lines. That's also why the best way to recap Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is not to look at all the plots, but to focus on the individual arcs of the characters. There was always a moral imperative to Orange, even in its first season. It's based on the memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, the character on whom Chapman is based, and Kerman is a devoted and vocal advocate for prison reform. OITNB began as a show that had the radical audacity to make otherwise apathetic people question the prison-industrial complex. Obama remains the only sitting president to ever visit a federal prison.
Netflix's Orange Is the New Black, the third season of which arrives in its entirety on Friday, is a quintessential dramedy. Set among inmates at a low-security women's prison, the series has addressed racism, solitary confinement, overdoses, and predatory prison guards among other sobering and sob-inducing realities while generally being hilarious and delightful. The show is a kind of sleight of hand, a wonderfully entertaining magic trick performed with cards that include incarceration, misery, mental illness, bad luck, poverty, and drug addiction. Orange is so reliably rollicking that it has always self-identified as a comedy, but because each episode is approximately 60, not 30, minutes long, the Emmys decreed it a drama. Back in season two, when the show started bringing its more diverse characters into focus, it did a great job of handling those characters' stories, because the stories were more personal.
Gloria's season two episode "Low Self-Esteem City" is a great example. It revealed that she's a victim of domestic violence, giving more context for the prison gang plot the series also threw her into. Because, like Gloria, all of these women, despite their various backgrounds, had ended up in the same place, and it was captivating to explore why that was.
And as the show moved away from Piper toward characters like Poussey, it was hard to see her story treated as if it were just as important as racial profiling and the death of a black woman. The ending to the sixth and penultimate season serves as a perfect example of this dichotomy. The season finale, "Be Free," introduced ICE detention centers at the same time that Piper is released from Litchfield. But as Piper goes to meet her brother, Cal, Blanca, a Latina character we've known since the pilot, is separated and put on an ICE bus. In the final scene, Piper's brother asks her what she'll do next.
In its uneven but mostly satisfying final season, on Netflix July 26, Orange applies its fluid attentions to immigration, in yet another unprecedented, if rushed, story line. A bit too much time is devoted to a newly paroled Piper's relationship with Alex, who is now her wife, and rough transition back into bourgeois-bohemian New York City life. Yet elsewhere, beloved characters get endings that feel right even when they're crushing—ones that don't reflect justice so much as the harsh calculus of privilege, savvy, drive, luck and social support that governs outcomes for incarcerated people. Litchfield saw some serious changes in Season 3 with the federal prison being bought by the private company Management and Correction Corporation .
As the inmates and correctional officers dealt with the cost-saving changes of the evil cooperation, the series still managed to have a lighter air in its third season. You know how the Emmys struggled with whether or not Orange Is the New Black is a comedy or drama? Well, Season 3 definitely felt like it fell more into the comedy category. The show is based around Taylor Schilling, who plays Piper Chapman that gets sent to prison 10 years after she got caught up in transporting drug money across international lines. "Orange is the New Black" is made by 'Weeds' creator Jenji Kohan, and is based on Piper Kerman's memoir of a year spent in prison.
You can watch the series Orange Is the New Black on the OTT platform Netflix if you have a subscription for that. If the eighth season of the series Orange Is the New Black announces, all episodes of the series Orange Is the New Black Season 8 will be released on the same day of the release like previous seasons. The season 8 plot is expected to focus on Piper Chapman who was accused to have been involved in a drug case for his girlfriend, 10 years after the present time in the series and gets sentenced for fifteen months. The story depicts the various incidents of Piper Chapman's character and the other women in prison. Sophia and Daya's respective scenes with Piper and Taystee during this final season hit right in that perfect middle ground that made the show so good in early seasons.
Piper and Sophia are both free, but Sophia's freedom came with a sacrifice, since she had to drop her lawsuit against MCC, the private owners of Litchfield. Daya and Taystee are both facing life in prison, but Taystee chooses to do good rather than follow Daya's path. Piper Chapman is a public relations executive with a career and a fiance when her past suddenly catches up to her. In her mid-30s she is sentenced to spend time in a minimum-security women's prison in New York for her association with a drug runner 10 years earlier.
This Netflix original series is based on the book of the same title. Forced to trade power suits for prison orange, Chapman makes her way through the corrections system and adjusts to life behind bars, making friends with the many eccentric, unusual and unexpected people she meets. It can serve as a story about the life of the show's characters after the last season. With this, the fans will have something to look forward to in the future, and maybe there might be a chance for the series to return in the future if the creators want to do it. After Suzanne's Season 2 plot with Vee, she got a more lighthearted storyline in Season 3 with her becoming an sensation in Litchfield due to her writing The Time Hump Chronicles. One of the fans of her science-fiction erotica was Maureen, who tried to have a sexual relationship with Crazy Eyes.
Despite Crazy Eyes' obsession with Piper in Season 1 and how she had created the character Admiral Rodcocker, she confessed to Morello that she is actually a virgin. Yet, the final moments of Season 3 in the lake with a bizarre game of catch with a turtle set up that Maureen and Suzanne could be a couple in Season 4. Orange is not the first drama to reveal the ugly underbelly of the carceral state.
Don't forget about Oz, which began airing in 1997 and practically required its viewers to watch from between their fingers, if they even managed to make it through all six seasons at all. But the tales Orange tells are all the more effective thanks to how easy it is to point to their corollaries in real life. Despite CCA's best efforts to mask the goings-on inside its facilities, we know about them. It's virtually impossible for the fictional circumstances of Litchfield to be more devastating than the truth of life at Winnfield Correctional and private prisons like it all over the country. And that's one of the most exciting things about "Orange," which enters its third season a calm, confident and yet deeply emotional beast. A show initially created on the back of a narrative steeped with white privilege — "what happens when a pretty white woman from an upper-class background has to go to prison with the non-white people and the poors?
" — "Orange" has now stripped that away to the point where Piper, by the end of Season 3, is at times almost an afterthought to the primary story being told. Instead of a series of flashbacks for one character, we get peeks into the pasts of multiple Litchfield denizens—guards and inmates alike, some portrayed in childhood and some in adulthood, all in scenes related to motherhood. That's because the episode revolves around Mother's Day, and meditates both on how characters were shaped by their parents and how some of them are now shaping kids even from behind bars. It's the kind of issue-oriented episode that you might fear would be didactic, especially given the show's tendency towards sentimentality and cliché during backstory segments.
But as is also typical for Orange, the episode leavens the sweet with the dark. Aleida Diaz prepares her daughter for childbirth by telling her that having kids will ruin her life—but hey, having a baby is nice too. One inmate retrieves drugs from her kid's diaper, and partakes of them while neglecting the infant. Sophia offers her less-than-sensitive son dating advice so antifeminist that even he seems ready to write a think piece about it. Last season's major story arc involved the machinations of the manipulative and mercenary Vee , an unprecedentedly cutthroat character. It will take some time before I can say if my love for stories like Sophia's or Cindy's outweighs my disdain for the tragedy porn, but right now, it doesn't.
As the cast members said goodbye in short clips featured over the finale's credits, I couldn't find joy in it. I still love characters like Red and Suzanne, but I haven't been able to recommend this season to viewers who dropped out long ago. I don't want them stuck with the image of Karla dying in the desert, a moment so heavy it consumes everything else. We don't need to be reminded of Eric Garner while we're watching a beloved character die. We don't need to imagine Sandra Bland's final moments projected onto someone we've built a connection with over seven seasons.
When the show uses tragedy in this fashion, it's clear the writers are working from a white perspective and aiming at a white audience that doesn't think these horrors can be subtle. At a certain point in its run, the show decided it had the job of educating its white viewers, and it came at the expense of alienating black and brown viewers. The show doesn't seem to care that black and brown viewers may walk away horrified by what they've seen so long as white viewers better understand whatever social justice hashtag is currently trending.
One of the most persuasive criticisms of the show's exploitative qualities came from the writer and critic Ashley Ray-Harris, who has criticized the series for failing to tell nuanced stories about its characters of color. Now that the show is at an end and we can get a better sense of its overall message, I've asked Ray-Harris to talk out Orange Is the New Black with me, to examine and interrogate the show's final season and its ultimate legacy. So that was the overall story arc of what was going on with the prison itself. The next few slides will go through what exactly all the inmates were up to during the third season.
This great show with an unfortunate title follows Piper, a 30-something upstanding bourgeois lady (she makes "artisinal beauty products" for criminey's sake), as she turns herself into prison for transporting drug money one time in her 20s. But it's not the Oz-like ecosystem of prison life that is so compelling. Orange is the New Black cribs a page from Lost's book and gives us flashbacks to Piper's life before the clink and how and why her fellow inmates wound up terrorizing her in the pokey. Furthermore, this even surpasses debuts seasons of The Crown and Glow. It was revealed by Netflix that the show was, without a doubt, one of its most-watched original series. It leaves a possibility of the show getting renewed in the future, and one more thing can be the main factor in this.
This factor is the show's rating, which has been consistently great, both the critics and the fans loved each, and everyone loved every season of it. But on the other hand, if it doesn't get renewed, do feel bad as a spin-off of the show might be happening. While Soso told him he was horrible at his job, which he is since he ruined Berdie's career out of jealously, he somehow ended Season 3 in not a bad spot. After Red complimented Healy in front of his wife Katya, Red used his crush toward her to try to get her job back in the kitchen. Healy was hurt that Red was using him, but by the end of the season, he had let his feelings get the best of him by giving Red produce to make her happy.
He also gave Katya her freedom by offering her an apartment, which actually led to Katya appreciating Healy for the first time ever. Although he genuinely cared for Red, he wasn't too upset when Red said their paths crossed too late in life since Katya stopped by the prison to give him Olive Garden leftovers. Some early episodes feature nudity and simulated sex, such as when a woman reaches her hand under some blankets and makes a man moan, or two women have oral sex in a shower. There is a lot of discussion of lesbians and having sex with women, and viewers see women kissing, cuddling, and being naked together. Even in episodes which feature the backstories of the show's male characters, "Orange" is a show about women — a show that is so powerful because it shouts against the idea that a single "strong female character" equals diversity.
There are women who prefer to be invisible, and women who demand to be seen, and women who just want to get through the day. But "Orange" finds the beauty in them, even in their most stripped down and ugly moments. #OrangeHeads, in the penultimate episode, "Don't Make Me Come Back There," Daya finally gives birth.
So since she's pooping (and yes, I meant to write pooping because I'm sick of this dumb ass storyline which is basically Donkey Kong excrement), that means we are finally going to get some Daya flashbacks this season. As much as she's been talked about, we haven't really learned a whole heck of a lot about her since Season One and, in my opinion, that's too long to go without some serious character development. Well, you can imagine my dismay when this episode turns out to be Aleida-centric.
Listen, Aleida is great, but Daya needs to have her moment to shine. Her pregnancy was a colossal waste of an opportunity for some serious exploration into the world of pregnant inmates. This is not to say that Aleida's story is not well-acted in the episode. But hello, I think viewers would have liked more attention to be paid to the soon-to-be mother as opposed to the mother of the soon-to-be mother. It's like two steps forward, one step back withOrange is the New Black. Alight, let's get to it and talk about what the show got right and wrong in this episode.
Even though I'm dying to find out what happens to Alex, see what crazy move Piper makes next and how the inmates react when they learn that there's a boatload of new women coming in, the Season 3 finale has left me especially satisfied. Turns out, the storyline I've complained about most got the best conclusion. When the guards decide to quit right when the perimeter fence is being repaired, it's Norma who opts to seize the opportunity and make a run for it. However, no one is escaping and they know it, rather, Norma leads the charge to an absolutely idyllic romp at the "freedom lake." The sequence wraps up so many storylines in the most beautiful, heartwarming way.
We get to see Norma make a slow motion run for it, Flaca have her moment with Gloria, Poussey float up to Brook and grab her hand, Aleida hug Daya, Cindy have her mikvah - and I could go on and on. It's the ultimate feel-good sequence for a show that's packed with characters I've come to adore. It's brimming with heart, had me laughing and tearing up, and left me with something super joyful to hold onto until the show returns. Where I part with you a bit is in your argument that the show didn't offer us the rich storytelling for characters of color that it did for white characters in its final season. I, too, disliked the moment when Taystee attempted suicide, but I think the rest of her final season arc was perhaps the strongest of the whole run. And this is not me saying that I would have wanted to watch a version of this show without Piper or Red or Alex or Pennsatucky.
But it is to say that even Orange Is the New Black seemed a little surprised by how much people loved its many vibrant women of color. That speaks to your point about how the show, even when it tried really hard, was perpetually filtered through a white lens. What managed to keep Sophia from that fate might just be that Laverne Cox's career blew up, and she ended up having less time for the final few seasons of the show.
I've always been a Piper Chapman fan, however, so this may be where we differ most. And I think the final season is instructive when it comes to how the show uses Piper. She doesn't even try to become an activist (outside of taking some courses that suggest she's going to work in some sort of legal field). She simply lives her life and eventually gets a job at Starbucks.
She made money off the labor of other women in the prison. The show could've made her face consequences for any of these actions, but she never does. Meanwhile, Gloria almost sacrifices her freedom helping an ICE detainee call her children. Cox, for her part, was grateful for the authentic representation of life as a trans woman. Her character, Sophia Burset, ends the series by being released from prison and following her dreams of becoming a hairstylist. Where fan favorite cast members revealed key plot points hidden amongst some red herrings.
The conversation heightened as fans debated over which stories felt true to each character. After a successful start to OITNB it carried through to Season 2 leaving us hanging on desperately for the Third Season. Only being proven that OITNB is always gripping yet humorous, Season 3 proceeded to take a different turn, with a simpler outcome to the show. I also found myself watching the first 6 episodes over again 3 times after as i was confused by the start of Ep1 plus the story was slow throughout. As such, the phrase "binge watching" was just starting to gain currency when the first season of Orange—all 13 hours of it—showed up on Netflix.
Viewers who now regularly consume a full season's worth of a given series within 24 hours still weren't sure that they could get used to this new form of couch potato–dom. Kohan's show played no small part in converting skeptics. I remember marathoning the season in a weekend, spurred on by my impatience to know everyone in Orange's tremendous cast of characters.
