How 'Orange Is the New Black' Turned Into a Comforting Sitcom
Orange Is the New Black, that nice little sitcom that acts as though it’s a big important drama, is back for a third season on Netflix on Friday.
“These are complicated ladies in a complicated place,” says prison official Joe Caputo in the season premiere. Ah, that’s exactly what this show wants you to think. But in fact, they are women, each with a few distinctive characteristics (Daya is sweetly idealistic; Sophia is no-nonsense; Crazy Eyes is crazily vulnerable), confined in a place where everyone acts pretty much the way you to expect them to. Thus, if Laura Prepon’s Alex returns to the prison bitter and resentful toward Taylor Schilling’s Piper, we can be pretty sure that soon enough they’ll be smooching and murmuring sweet nothings into each other’s ears.
As the series has proceeded, some of its most prominent officials and guards have become more lenient, more like gentle scolds than disciplinarians. “It’s a whole new world around here — a kinder, gentler Litchfield,” says Caputo, who has taken his mustache and ascended to a leadership role in the prison, rearranging his office furniture to achieve a more placid effect with the help of a feng shui manual.
Related: ‘Orange is the New Black’ Season 3: 11 Things We Know So Far
Similarly, Sam Healy — already the show’s resident amateur therapist — is now bolstering Red’s morale by asking her to help translate the language barrier between him and his mail-order bride, which seems to be heading toward a more intimate relationship with Red herself. Let show creator Jenji Kohan and her writers try to convince you you’re watching something groundbreaking. The more episodes they create, however, the more you realize this is yet another TV workplace comedy in a quirky setting: Orange Is the New Black is Hogan’s Heroes in jumpsuits; Gilligan’s Island on dry land.
The minimal evolution of the series has been mostly salutary. In its infancy, OITNB centered around Piper Chapman — we were introduced to prison life through her wide blue eyes, her privileged blond hair bobbing and weaving its way through what looked to her, and therefore us, like a scary, anarchic place. Although OITNB is based on a book by the real-life Piper Kerman, Kohan has said she used the white, upper middle class character as a mere ploy to get networks interested in the show so she could tell the stories she really wanted to get to, which involve a wide variety of women — black, Latino, gay, transgender, Russian, you name it — who aren’t often the protagonists on a TV show.
Kohan succeeded in introducing (and the case of Kate Mulgrew, Natasha Lyonne, and Annie Golden, reintroducing) us to some very fine performers, most of them given generous showcases to demonstrate what they can do.
Indeed, the structure of most OITNB episodes — in which one character is brought to the fore and we see flashbacks to that person’s past history, details about how that woman or man was shaped and became the person she or he is — has by now, in the new season, become predictable, either comfortingly or tediously so, depending on your degree of engagement with the series.
This season OITNB tackles some big issues: bedbugs, book-burning, and the healing power of a prison improv class governed by the rules of the Upright Citizens Brigade when its students are anything but upright citizens.
It’s all pretty pleasant, even if the jokes are often corny. Nicky says, “I’m speaking allegorically here,” and Luschek the electrician says, “You’re gonna talk about Al Gore now?” Get it? Al Gore? Allegory? Are you laughing through your tears at the poignant comedy of Orange Is the New Black yet? If so, you’re in for a fine new binge.
Orange Is the New Black Season 3 starts streaming Friday, June 12 on Netflix.
