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Orange Is The New Black


The new season is finally here. We've waited a whole year to watch the show in less than a week. Damnit. A show that drives viewers to Netflix every summer is a depiction of a real life memoir of Piper Kerman and her life behind bars.

Netflix is private with their viewership (even to the directors and actors of the show), but it is estimated that Orange Is The New Black (OITNB) is the most streamed Netflix Original ever. OITNB boasted 9-million viewers in the month of June alone in 2016.

The addictive nature of the show captures your attention by portraying the dehumanization of prison. It takes the powerful felons, murderers, thieves, embezzlers and convicts of the era and makes them subhuman. They're all brought to the same level playing field at Litchfield with their freedom always lurking over their head, but never quite within reach. The show was an eye opener to many as the HBOesque aspects that capture deeply human depictions is portrayed (it is very common to see full nudity multiple times per episode). It transforms labels in a way that is true to life with the rawness of real life situations and decisions.

With reviews of shows, I will attempt to not give any major spoilers. If I do, I will always try to notify beforehand.

The series opens as a depiction of Piper Kerman (Taylor Schilling) turning herself in. She goes to prison at Litchfield, which is housed in New York. Her and her husband, Larry, arrive at the prison - nervous and confused with everything they're seeing. The series begins to tell the story of what got her there as well as everything currently taking place.


Once Piper settles in, we begin to meet all of the other characters. The layout of the show is that we basically learn about one character each episode. The model of the show keeps you curious. There are confrontations and characteristics of each person that leaves you curious as to how they got there and what their 'charge' was. Once we learn it, it all begins to make sense as to how they act. Sure, some get broken, but we see characteristics of their life out of prison - such as addiction and how they can't escape it.

OITNB hits the major emotions. The six basic, although now classified into four emotions (that's another article topic), are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. It is easy to experience all of these emotions in just one episode, let alone the entire series thus far.

The show also tackles major issues of the world today. One of the major topics is lesbianism, which sometimes happens to completely straight women in an all women prison leaving them confused and changed. - SPOILER - Piper and Larry do not last. Piper was with a lady named Alex before her marriage, who she actually ends up in prison with. They hook up multiple times in prison, which leads to tense situations. - END OF SPOILER - Many of the characters in the show have lesbian encounters and we learn how this can cause problems throughout their time there.

The diversity of the characters gives us a fruitful representation of America's melting pot of ethnicities. We witness this through racial tension between the main characters through verbal fights, physical fights and even murder. We also witness and learn of the transition of a transgender character that gets subjected repeatedly.


The best part of this show to me is the questioning of life behind bars and it's real duration. Sure, we know how long a 10 year sentence is, but really think of how long 10 years is. You basically went through your entire schooling career of kindergarten through graduation during this time. We immediately love characters, learn to love some and despise some. The ones that we root for we begin to question whether we believe they deserve a second chance. OITNB challenges this question of whether people can truly change after being incarcerated. While we do definitely witness some change in characters, does that ultimately lead us to believe they should be given a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) chance prematurely instead of wasting their life behind bars? What is it going to take to truly change them, if they can be changed?

While we're learning prison lingo, it also becomes apparent that we begin to think of people in prison now. Are they going through the same things? Experiencing the same hardships that we learn of in the show? Are there really some people that we would invite into our homes even after they've been in prison? Surely there are a few characters from the show (who depict real life people) that we would feel comfortable around. This should at least spark conversation over of our own judgement of others.

Ultimately, I believe OITNB teaches us a lot about judgement and how it can negatively affect people their whole lives. If a prisoner gets out and we don't hire them, segregate them and take away aspects that make them human, isn't it evident that they're going to end up back in prison? In the show we learn every aspect of the their lives from their upbringing to modern day and have real opinions of them, so why can't we do the same outside of a show? I believe it teaches us not to judge a book by its cover because we never know what they've endured that caused their breaking point that forever changed their lives. People can change and we can help them, all we have to do is care.

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