Orange is the New Black
Netflix’s
latest original series “Orange is
the New Black” that was released this past summer. All 13 episodes were
available for viewing pleasure in one sitting. For me personally, I am not
really a person who sits and watches a show over and over again unless it’s a
marathon of a favorite past show. After seeing commercials about it I decided
to give it a whirl.
Once I started watching I was
hooked. This show is based off a memoir written by Piper Kerman and directed by
Jenji Kohan who is known for her previous work on Showtime’s “Weeds”. The
premise of the series is about a female Yuppie New Yorker, Piper Chapman (Taylor
Schilling), who is serving time at an upstate women’s penitentiary for being an
accomplice running drug money with her ex-girlfriend after college. The show
starts off with Piper happily engaged to her fiancé Larry Bloom played by Jason
Biggs in their perfect Brooklyn apartment. It is not until the day she walks
into Litchfield Penitentiary that you start to feel bad for the lead character.
She is ignorant to the lifestyle that she is about being a part of for the next
15 months.
As I sat through the first few hour-long
episodes you start to learn many of the inmates back stories as well as
Piper’s. One of these inmates is actually the person who brought Piper to
Litchfield in the first place; Alex Vause (Laura Prepon). Vause is the
ex-girlfriend who gave Piper’s name to the police thus having making her
sentence a lot more torturous and complicated. You learn as the series unfolds
the relationship in which the two women had and you watch it evolve in a
confusing way. Chapman is happily engaged and straight but is drawn to Vause
even after putting her through the hell that she faces in the first season. I
find it to be one of the aspects of the show even though Chapman starts to lose
herself as time passes and she falls from the victim to the victimizer.
There is a character Suzanne Warren
who is nicknamed “Crazy Eyes” whom falls in love with Chapman and calls her
Dandelion. Crazy Eyes is aggressive with her love and just wants Piper to be
hers but Chapman politely turns her down and says that she is engaged.
Meanwhile outside of the prison Larry is writing a piece to perform on a radio
station about his cooping with his beloved fiancé who is incarcerated. He gets
his information from visits to Piper and that just what he wrote her complaints
and judgments of her fellow inmates. Once the radio show was on air the who
prison community listened to the hurtful comments that were being said about
them, this lead to “Crazy Eyes” pissing on Dandelions bunk floor out of hatred.
Orange is the New Black is one of
the greatest shows I have watched and it only took me just a little over three
days. The anticipating of the second season is only growing longer and longer
and I cannot wait to see what is in store for Chapman and the rest of
Litchfield in 2014.
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