Orange Is the New Black (2013) Review: Prison Ensemble

Is Orange Is the New Black worth watching?

Yes. Orange Is the New Black is a funny, angry and often deeply moving prison dramedy whose greatest achievement is its enormous, diverse ensemble of women, most of whom television had rarely bothered to portray. It helped define what a streaming original could be, and at its best it balances comedy and tragedy with real skill. The reservations are length and consistency: across seven seasons, the quality swings noticeably, and some later stretches lose focus.

What is Orange Is the New Black about?

Piper Chapman is a comfortable, middle-class New Yorker whose past catches up with her. A decade earlier, she carried drug money for her then-girlfriend, Alex Vause, and now she must serve a sentence at Litchfield, a minimum-security women’s prison. Piper expects to keep her head down; instead she is plunged into a world of cliques, rules and rivalries, and the other inmates quickly prove far more interesting than she is.

Orange Is the New Black is an American series created by Jenji Kohan and inspired by Piper Kerman’s memoir. Taylor Schilling plays Piper and Laura Prepon plays Alex, with Kate Mulgrew, Natasha Lyonne, Uzo Aduba, Danielle Brooks, Selenis Leyva, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Dascha Polanco and Nick Sandow among the ensemble. This review covers the complete series: seven seasons and 91 episodes, released between 2013 and 2019.

The Trojan horse that became an ensemble

Kohan has described Piper as a way into the story, a familiar figure through whom viewers could meet characters they might otherwise overlook. That is exactly how the series works. The first season is framed around Piper, but each episode uses flashbacks to tell the story of another inmate, showing how poverty, addiction, family, bad luck and bad decisions led them to Litchfield. Within a season or two, Piper is just one thread among many.

This structure is the show’s master stroke. It gives voice to Black, Latina, older, queer and transgender women, and it refuses to reduce any of them to their crimes. The flashbacks are sometimes funny, sometimes devastating, and frequently both.

A cast that makes Litchfield live

The performances are consistently strong. Kate Mulgrew is formidable as Red, the prison kitchen’s steely ruler, and Natasha Lyonne’s Nicky brings sardonic wit and fragility in equal measure. Uzo Aduba’s Suzanne became one of the show’s most celebrated characters, and Aduba won Emmys for the role in both the comedy and drama categories. Danielle Brooks is the series’ secret heart as Taystee, a character whose arc across the seasons is among its most powerful.

Laura Prepon brings a cool magnetism to Alex, and Taylor Schilling is effective as a character designed to be sometimes insufferable, even if Piper remains the least compelling person on the show.

Where the sentence starts to drag

At 91 episodes, Orange Is the New Black inevitably has lulls. The tone can lurch uneasily between broad comedy and brutal drama, sometimes within the same scene, and later seasons pile on storylines and new characters at the expense of focus. Some arcs feel stretched and others rushed, and Piper’s romantic back-and-forth grows tiresome long before the series ends.

The show also becomes more explicitly political as it goes, turning its attention to the business of incarceration. That anger is often justified and sometimes powerful, but it can also make the writing feel didactic.

Who should watch Orange Is the New Black?

It is ideal for viewers who enjoy character-rich comedy and drama, large ensembles and stories about institutions and the people failed by them. It contains frequent strong language, nudity, sex, drug use and violence, including sexual violence, so it is strictly for adults. Seven seasons is a real commitment, but the early ones in particular reward a steady binge on Netflix.

If you enjoy it, try these next:

• The Wire, for a deeper, more systemic study of crime, institutions and the lives caught inside them.
• The Bear, for another chaotic ensemble comedy-drama with serious emotional undercurrents.

The verdict

Orange Is the New Black is a flawed but essential piece of television history, a prison comedy-drama that gave space to dozens of women rarely seen on screen and made audiences care about every one of them. Its later seasons wobble and its lead is its weakest link, but the ensemble and the emotional power of its best episodes make it well worth the time.

Rating: 4/5