orange is the new black

The series begins revolving around Piper Chapman , a woman in her thirties living in New York City who is sentenced to 15 months in Litchfield Penitentiary, a minimum-security women's federal prison in upstate New York. Chapman was convicted of transporting a suitcase full of drug money for her girlfriend Alex Vause , an international drug smuggler. The offense had occurred 10 years before the start of the series and in that time Chapman had moved on to a quiet, law-abiding life among New York's upper middle class. Her sudden and unexpected indictment disrupts her relationships with her fiancé, family and friends. In prison, Chapman is reunited with Vause (who named Chapman in her trial, resulting in Chapman's arrest), and they re-examine their relationship.

Simultaneously, Chapman, along with the other inmates, attempt to grapple with prison's numerous, inherent struggles. Episodes often feature flashbacks of significant events from various inmates' and prison guards' pasts. These flashbacks typically depict how an inmate came to be in prison or develop a character's backstory. The prison is initially operated by the "Federal Department of Corrections" , and was in a later season acquired by the Management & Correction Corporation , a private prison company.

I am very interested in the ways in which media and popular culture both reflect and construct ideas, identities, and politics. It develops complex characters, with emotional backstories and narrative arcs that show them as full human beings whose lives intersect with patriarchal institutions in unjust ways. They aren't just one-dimensional characters who serve as a backdrop for male protagonists, and they don't fit neatly into stereotypes.

The show isn't without its compromises (the problematic women-in-prison genre has been around for a long time), but in general it challenges mainstream depictions of gender and humanizes female prisoners in a way that is very subversive when it comes to the televisual format. There is another story to be told about the showrunner, Jenji Kohan, and the mostly female writers and female crew behind the scenes. The show has given a voice to women and proven that there are both critical and popular audiences for these stories. Orange Is the New Black is a television series loosely based on the memoir of Piper Kerman, a white cisgender woman, in which she recounts her time in prison on drug smuggling charges. Even though, and possibly because my work is in part about trans people and prisons, I came rather late to watching the show. Weary of the ways both imprisoned people and trans women of color are figured in visual culture, I feared the worst.

Season 6 ended with Piper released from prison, but viewers who've been waiting since the beginning for the show to cast its Trojan horse aside will be disappointed. 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 , who remains behind bars. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Black queer and black feminist analysis of Orange Is the New Black has been generous. But, for me, it is the place of whiteness—not of blackness or brownness—that makes the show's race politics most problematic. By centering Piper's perspective on race and power, Orange Is the New Black constructs a fantasy of whiteness extremely useful in the candy land of the contemporary post-racial imaginary. Because it's the one where… This episode is Tricia's story, as we see her life in flashbacks and her death in the prison.

The first character to be killed off in the show, Tricia's death was a shocking moment rooted in the cruelties of the prison system. Tricia was a good person who lived a terrible life, including sexual abuse as a child, homelessness, and drug addiction, and who committed suicide when she could no longer see a way out of being manipulated by the guard Mendez, whose power over her was almost total. Stories like Tricia's are the stories the series was created to tell. Orange changed ideas about what television could be, and whose stories could be told—even whose stories matter the most. And while the show was in production, the scenarios Kohan and her team were writing about became more and more prominent in the news cycle. A Season 6 story line about prison guards competing in a game called "Fantasy Inmate"—winning points for fights, overdoses, and suicide attempts that happened under their watch—seemed to anticipate the exposure of a strikingly callous Facebook group for Border Patrol guards.

Daya is also left with no lifeline to the outside world after being abandoned by C.O. Bennett , giving up her daughter to the household of biological father George "Pornstache" Mendez and turning herself in for a life sentence for shooting a guard and inciting the prison-wide riot. When Daya links up with prison supplier Daddy — who Daya accidentally kills to start off the final season — and develops a drug dependence, even her mother Aleida, who is helping to sell the drugs, gives up on her. When Aleida is returned to prison after breaking her parole, the tumultuous mother-daughter pair once again find themselves at odds when Aleida discovers that Daya has recruited little Eva in the family business. In a bid to save her other children from following their same path, Aleida ends their power struggle by strangling her daughter in a cliffhanger attack. 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. Meanwhile, the majority of people will only watch the series, without Kerman's edifying segues. And although the show's creator Jenji Kohan has strewn nuggets of "reality" throughout the storylines, I fear they are too easily drowned out in the melodramatic swirl of a product that is designed to distract and amuse, curtailing the possibilities for reflection or education.

For example, the hardships of Chapman's fiancé, Larry Bloom (modeled on Kerman's now-husband Larry Smith, who stood by her during her entire ordeal), are largely reduced to self-centered sexual frustration and dalliances with quirky masturbation practices. In the "Fucksgiving" episode, Bloom arrives at the prison and learns that Chapman is in solitary confinement so he won't be able to see her. His distressed efforts to liberate her from "the hole" set off a chain of events that zoom viewers into the explosive season finale. Now, yes, sexual contact is an important loss when a romantic partner is incarcerated—alongside other losses of help with child-rearing, taking care of household matters, and companionship. And it is completely possible that after driving for hours to attend a prison visit you could be told that your loved one will not be permitted to join you and you have to leave the facility, even if it is a holiday. But it is highly improbable that the reason for this is that she was performing a sexy dance with her stunning co-defendant at the raucous, music-filled going away party of yet another gorgeous prisoner.

A sympathetic correctional officer probably won't apologize to you, and your complaints will certainly not be communicated up the chain of command. The series also resonated in a way that went beyond industry bragging rights, helping push criminal justice reform and transgender rights to the forefront of the national conversation. Through flashbacks that showed how each character wound up in prison, "Orange" encouraged viewers to identify with a vast array of characters whose race, religion, class, politics or gender identity often differed from their own. 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 Connecticut 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. 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. 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.

But if the series seemed to be running on fumes, Season Seven allows it to go out reminding us why it was so great, and so different, to begin with. Last season concluded not only with Piper being released, but Blanca being transferred into Litchfield's new wing for holding undocumented immigrants. In depicting the monstrous partnership between ICE and privatized prisons, Orange proves it still has important things to say about this world, and the larger one around it.

(That subplot even briefly justifies the ongoing use of the flashbacks, with an episode featuring a collection of heartbreaking stories about how three different women ended up in this converted cafeteria.) These new episodes are more Piper-centric than they need to be. But they bring remarkable closure to this huge cast of characters, with a ratio of tragic endings to relatively happy ones that feels true to the spirit of things without making the audience question why they've been watching this show for so long. Kohan says the room missed all the characters who didn't return, which is why the series finale welcomed back so many familiar faces for both the finale and end-credits montage , which saw the cast filming rolling goodbyes.

Gloria was another character viewers learned a lot more about in the final season. A flashback revealed the mother of two boys had left two daughters in Puerto Rico when she first came to New York in hopes of making a better life for her family. By the time she was settled, her older daughters decided not to join her. That new information, coupled with Gloria's predicament in the detention center kitchen, further drove home OITNB's overall message of the range of challenges incarcerated mothers face.

Litchfield's ICE facility also pulled back in fan-favorite Maritza. The inmate, who had been missing since the finale of the season five riot separation, is returned to Litchfield when she's caught up in an ICE raid. Maritza had gotten out of prison during the time that passed, but she soon discovers that her mother lied to her about being born in America.

When she finds out that she was actually born in Colombia, she still opts to help the detainees around her and shares a number for a free lawyer, catching the eye of the ICE agents. In the fifth episode of the final season, she is deported back to Colombia and, in a special effect, vanishes on an outbound plane never to return. In the season six finale, Jenji Kohan's prison dramedy had released starring inmate Piper Chapman , sent Dominican inmate Blanca Flores (Laura Gómez) into U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody and returned wrongfully convicted Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson to the maximum security facility at Litchfield Penitentiary. All three cliffhangers — as specific as they may be — ended up paving three diverging paths for OITNB to follow in order to deliver the final season's range of endings for all of the characters who have touched the show's prison industrial complex. The fifth season shows the prisoners revolting against the guards, wardens and the system after MCC's failed handling of an inmate's death at the hands of a guard in the fourth season. The inmate death had followed a peaceful protest and subsequent instigation of an inmate fight by another guard. Fueled by the conditions the inmates are forced to tolerate, as well as grudges against the prison guards, a three-day riot ensues. During the riot, some inmates attempt to negotiate better living conditions and seek justice for the death of the inmate, while others pursue their own interests and entertainment, and a few seek no involvement.

At the emergence of the riot, the guard who incited the fight in the prior season is critically wounded by an inmate who took the gun the guard illegally brought into the prison. At the end of the season, SWAT raids the prison to end the riot and remove all inmates from the facility. During this raid, a correctional officer is fatally wounded by a corrupt "strike team", which then conspires to blame the guard's death on a number of inmates who hid in an underground bunker, found by one inmate, and had taken the guard hostage. 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. Orange began as a reflection of real-life horror stories that President Barack Obama's administration and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers were at least trying to end with measures aimed at reforming the criminal justice system, such as rolling back mandatory minimum sentences. Obama remains the only sitting president to ever visit a federal prison. But Piper was really a Trojan horse for the kinds of stories Orange was more interested in — or maybe just better at — telling. Gradually, we got to know all the other inmates, through a mix of pre-prison flashbacks and stories about their lives behind bars, and discovered that they're at least as complex and sympathetic as Piper, and usually more so.

By the time the first season climaxes with Piper's doofus husband Larry doing a public radio story based on Piper's initial impressions of her new neighbors, they and we understand just how shallow and incorrect most of her assumptions were. Orange Is the New Black was technically the second of Netflix's original series to debut, arriving five months after House of Cards in 2013. But where Cards was exactly the kind of antihero drama that had been made for years on cable TV , Orangefelt like something new in almost every way. As the women's prison drama enters its seventh and final season this week, it feels right to celebrate it as the first series explicitly designed for the streaming era, and still one of the best at taking advantage of the freedoms offered by this brave new programming world. Following the accidental death of evil prison chief, Desi Piscatella, by armed guards in series five, Taystee Jefferson was set up as the murderer.

She went to trial, was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The last 13 episodes also follow the darker trajectory the show has taken since the third season, when the prison system became the main antagonist threatening the lives and well-being of the inmates. At the end of Season 4, a guard suffocated Poussey Washington while restraining her, one of the most heartbreaking moments in the show's history. Poussey, the show later elaborated, had been imprisoned for possessing half an ounce of marijuana, a "crime" so commonplace that even the guard who killed her had committed it.

In the aftermath of Poussey's death, Litchfield inmates rioted, demanding justice. Another series of catastrophes ensued when SWAT teams accidentally killed a prison guard and implicated the inmates, leading to the wrongful conviction of Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson for murder. In addition to this, although the characters themselves are fictional, the scapegoating of black inmates – we won't name who or why, to avoid spoilers – and broader racism that is a key feature of the program is realistic, and draws on stories of real women's plights. Black Lives Matter features in the show as a comfort to those affected by the institutional racism of the criminal justice system, and in real life it works to end injustice towards black people in America. In the final season, this means a #MeToo story line and a brutal arc about I.C.E. and immigration detentions. In another series, this might seem like a forced attempt to keep up with current events.

In "Orange," it works; its prison world is one where time moves differently than on the outside, where the names and policies may change, but the essential divide remains between those who get to cross the wall, and those who can't. Remaining central to the show all the way through is Piper and her relationship with Alex. The pair got married before Piper's early release only to be separated while Alex serves out the remainder of a four-year sentence.

In a bid to survive the long distance, both women agreed to an open marriage and explored other sexual relationships — Piper with new friend Zelda and Alex in a more treacherous liaison with corrections officer Artesian McCullough — before eventually finding their way back to one another. When a scorned McCullough initiates Alex's transfer to a maximum security facility in Ohio (opening the door for the nostalgic return of many characters; more on that below), Piper follows Alex to Ohio for a fresh start. Before the screen fades to orange for one final time, Piper, now taking law classes, working at Starbucks and living a "clean" life (in a full-circle pilot reference), visits with Alex in Ohio for a happy and committed reunion. The 'Orange Is the New Black' cast dives into the endings and surprises of the final season and series finale of Jenji Kohan's Netflix prison dramedy.

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. The season shows how some prisoners are able to move beyond their time in prison while others are captured by the system and through their own flaws and/or systemic problems in the structure of US society and its justice system are unable to progress. 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. A couple of women, Red and Blanca (Laura Gómez), realize the tactical advantage a prison riot affords them, and they start sifting through guard files in search of evidence that Piscatella is unfit to be working at Litchfield. It turns out they're right — Piscatella left his last job at a men's prison after he handcuffed an inmate in a shower and proceeded to scald him to death.

Red and Blanca are aided in their mission with the help of pharmaceutical-grade speed, which one of the guards has been smuggling in and keeping in his locker in a bottle marked for energy-boosting vitamins — yet another symptom of Litchfield's danger and dysfunction. While she hit a bump with her 2011 feature directorial, the Mel Gibson drama,The Beaver ($971K), her TV directing credits over the last year forHouse of Cardsand Jenji Kohan'sOrange Is The New Blackearned the two-time Oscar-winning actress her first DGA noms of her career. The helmers' union recognized Foster for her work on theHouse of Cardssecond season episode "Chapter 22" as well as the first episode ofThe Orange Is The New Black's second season, "Thirsty Bird".

Foster's pair of DGA noms follow her Emmy nom last summer for comedy series directing on the third episode ofOrange Is the New Blackentitled "Lesbian Request Denied" . "Thirsty Bird" is about the dilemma Piper faces when she's on trial suddenly to testify against Alex's drug boss Kubra Balik. "Chapter 22" revolves around the political Underwoods entanglement in a scandal spurred by Tusk . This familiar data indicates something of the brute scale of the disaster that has befallen the nation's poor and minority communities since the early 1970s. But, as successive generations of prison activists and reformers have periodically rediscovered, when it comes to penal policy, recitation of numbers is never enough to jolt voters and politicians out of their dogmatic slumber. Historically, penal statistics have acquired social meaning and moral force only in tandem with humanistic forms of expression and representation—skillfully rendered stories, dramatic performances, music, and images that portray the lives and experiences of those caught up in the system.