Orange is The New Black (2013-2019)

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Orange Is The New Black (sometimes abbreviated to OITNB) is an American comedy-drama online television series produced for Netflix by Jenji Kohan. The series is based on Piper Kerman's novel, Orange Is The New Black: My Year in Women's Jail (2010), on her time at FCI Danbury, a minimum-security federal prison. [1]

Plot

When Orange Is The New Black made its debut in 2013, it was one of the first shows commissioned by Netflix. Loosely inspired by Piper Kerman's novel of the same name, Orange Is the New Black, tells the story of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a Brooklynite craftsman, whose experience laundering cash for her ex-heroin girlfriend's enterprise saw her sentenced to 15 months in a women's correctional facility. In the first few episodes, Piper (and viewers) revealed the truth of prison life in Litchfield Penitentiary: food, shower shoes, red tape, isolation, the multidimensional utility of maxi pads.

Orange Is The New Black looked different from everything else that was on TV at the moment. It's widespread, overwhelmingly female casts mirrored the demographics of the prison system itself, with a multiplicity of races, sexes, and socio-economic backgrounds. [2]

Empowering Character Development in Major Black Casts

From its inception, Orange Is The New Black has used flashbacks to help the viewer better connect to the characters. When used to contextualize the perspectives of imprisoned characters, this fictional technique helped to dispel stereotypical assumptions about people—and specifically people of colour — who wind up behind bars. It's not that these characters are "bad," the show shows to the viewer, but oftentimes, they were failed by a dysfunctional mechanism within the system. [3]

It will be easy to ignore the effect that Orange Is The New Black has on this story as a fictitious television program about a women's prison named Litchfield. Yet as season four was broadcast, the show appeared to catch the heart of a fractious political environment in which black people were reawakening to crimes committed against them. At its core, OITNB is a show that has always worked to redefine and explore what it means to be black on screen. This is apt considering the preponderance of black people in US prisons: 30% of female prisoners are African American.

Over its course, OITNB began to normalize a new type of "socially conscious" blackness on TV. Since the second season, as Piper Chapman's (Taylor Schilling) storyline begins to disappear into the background, black characters such as Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson, Suzanne "Wild Eyes" Warren, Sophia Burset, Black Cindy" Hayes and Poussey Washington have taken center stage. Despite the tragedy of their case, the black characters at OITNB are, in the main, full-bodied, refreshing and nuanced. They are given the space to grow, both by slipping into and overcoming the expectations of black women.

Taystee (Danielle Brooks) is a clear example of that. First introduced as a bouncy, brash joker who steals a few strands of Piper's blond hair to jazz her curls, Taystee eventually blooms into a woman who not only understands her worth but also has a profound awareness of structural prejudice and the strength of her normal, often cheerful leadership. "She has enough courage to say, 'The machine is fractured and made of sand. It's collapsing and it's being knocked down.' So she needs to restore it and build a solid base of bricks for Litchfield because it's her home."

In Orange Is The New Black, blackness is not typically silenced without cause; it is granted a forum to experiment. And that's a powerful thing to watch directly on our screens. [4]


Reference

  1. Orange Is the New Black. en.wikipedia.org. Retrieved on Feb 3, 2021.
  2. Gilbert, Sophie. What Orange Is the New Black Saw Coming. July 25, 2019. theatlantic.com. Retrieved on Feb 3, 2021.
  3. Brown, Keah. Season Four Of ‘Orange Is The New Black’ Has A Race Problem. July 1, 2016. Medium.com. Retrieved on Feb 3, 2021.
  4. Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie. Orange Is the New Black stars: 'I couldn't watch. I had to turn away'. June 5, 2017. theguardian.com. Retrieved on Feb 3, 2021.