ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK starring Taylor Schilling, created by Jenji Kohan (score: “You’ve Got Time”) is a women’s prison drama series written for Netflix arguably better than most one-off film productions. Piper Chapman (played by Schilling) is the blonde female protagonist who, coming from an upper class New York background, falls into a tempestuous affair with her lesbian international drug smuggler lover, Alex (Laura Prepon). Too late, she falls in love with a NY Jew boyfriend, Larry (Jason Biggs), from a background similar to hers. But, the feds catch up with her for acting as the money mule in the illicit affair years earlier. She ends up sentenced to a relatively light term of under two years in a minimum security NY federal prison called Litchfield.
Piper finds herself among a broad range of working class ethnic minorities, lesbians, and gender benders. Some critics have described the film/series as ‘raunchy’, but although the humor can be raw and often sexual, it is intrinsically an anti-prison film/series engaging in a study of human nature with all its warts to sensitize its audience to the fact every inmate’s face has a real human being with real lives before prison behind it.
The guards are portrayed in a relatively more 2-dimensional fashion and the prison scene is somewhat tamed for mainstream appetites, trivializing the gang violence, corruption, rape, and official brutality found in most prisons. Still, it is an excellent series achieving a mix of humor and banality balanced with the profound in humanizing its subjects, bringing into doubt our conviction felons are so different from ourselves or in need of being locked into cages for often petty or victimless crimes.
