TV #32 of 2019: Orange Is the New Black, season 7 Netflix’s flagship dramedy has always had two distinct modes of storytelling, which sometimes complement each other but more often work at cross-purposes. In the first, the program aims to tell grounded, realistic stories, using its prison setting and signature flashback structure to shine a …
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TV #2 of 2019: Orange Is the New Black, season 6 Moving the action over to the long-mentioned Maximum Security branch is a reasonable way for this prison show to keep itself fresh (and cut loose some of the huge cast it’s assembled over the years), but the writers have made some odd choices about …
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TV #20 of 2018: Orange Is the New Black, season 5 The latest chapter of Netflix’s flagship dramedy is somewhat experimental, spending the entire season on what turns out to be a three-day prison riot. For the most part, the experiment works: it shakes up the show’s usual storytelling rhythms and offers one of the …
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Book #49 of 2018: Out of Orange by Cleary Wolters The Netflix prison dramedy Orange Is the New Black began as an adaptation of a true-life memoir, with the character Alex Vause based on a figure from author Piper Kerman’s past. Out of Orange is that woman’s own account of her time as a smuggler-turned-prisoner, …
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TV #50 of 2017: Orange Is the New Black, season 4 Still a powerhouse this many seasons in, with an ever-deepening roster of characters and flashbacks. It’s hard to really discuss the arc of season 4 without spoilers, but it was a powerful indictment of the corporate prison system, with inefficiencies and unchecked (if not …
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Book #85 of 2016: Orange Is the New Black by Piper Kerman This memoir is far less dramatic and action-packed than its fictionalized Netflix adaptation. (And the real Piper frankly comes off as a lot less awful than her TV counterpart.) But fans of the show will still recognize much of its source material here, …
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