Orange Is The New Black

Right, what’s the Netflixiest show you can possibly think of?  Chances are, whether or not you have the streaming service in your home, nagging away at you until it chains you hopelessly to the sofa, that Orange Is The New Black is near the top of that list.  Sure, there’s House Of Cards, and you’ve got Stranger Things.  You might even love the often-overlooked The Get Down (I do).  But Netflix’s most watched original series is that one with orange jumpsuits about some women in a prison or something along those lines.  I can hardly become some sort of boxset streaming guru, then, if I haven’t watched this one.  So, a few months back, I took myself down to Litchfield Penitentiary and freely surrendered my viewing liberty to the minimum-security women’s prison there.  I’m now out the other side, six series down, with a seventh and final season due in 2019.  I’ve never been in a real prison, but I loved every minute of this one.

I’ve wanged on before about certain things that make human drama that extra bit tenser – I’m calling these my trigger themes.  You know, things like having a zombie apocalypse as a backdrop as in The Walking Dead, which means your favourite characters can die at any minute.  Or setting things in a dystopian future, like the Gilead of The Handmaid’s Tale.  All along, I’d forgotten that prison was one of the best trigger themes ever given to a drama series.  You’ve got the artificial and unnatural environment of cells and wings, an entrenched division of characters into prisoners, guards and those left behind, and the heightened stakes that come when prisoners dream of their freedom.  Orange Is The New Black has all of this and a load more stuff you won’t be expecting.  I was hooked in from episode one and happily threw the key away until I had watched every instalment.

Everything is packaged up for your middle-class sensitivities, as we enter the world of the prison through the eyes Piper Chapman, an educated New Yorker with a wealthy background who is self-surrendering on drugs charges trawled up from a misspent youth.  She wrinkles her nose at the showers, accidentally insults the food to the main chef and expects the guards to be reasonable when it comes to listening to her many complaints.  Piper is a good in to the prison world, but in later series she ends up being one of the least interesting things about it.  Once her fiancé, best friend and parents fall away, the show no longer needs its blonde, white leading lady.  Litchfield is divided racially into prison families: Hispanic, black and white, with a splinter group shooting off the whites for the methheads, who you can identify from their bad teeth.  While racial tension shouldn’t be boiled down to a plot device for our own entertainment, Orange Is The New Black simply reflects a prison predisposition for inmates to categorise themselves in this way, like the segregation discussion in Dear White People.

What’s surprising is the limited interaction between these groups.  Some of the cast go for series only having scenes with their own prison families.  While the main white family (finally) embraces Piper under the matriarchal protection of fiery Red, you’ll want to hang out in the black family for bigger belly laughs, or in the Latina family for the wittiest bilingual dialogue.  I found myself getting excited every time a scene began for the Latina characters, especially if my favourite Litchfielder of all was there: Mendoza.  Played by Selenis Leyva (who, like all the cast, is unrecognisable in her IMDB headshot), Gloria Mendoza is capable of a wonderful combination of bad-assery, smart-mouthery, mother-hennery and unadulterated sass that my main feedback would have been to make the whole damn thing about her (and maybe Aleida).  She could push Piper down the stairs just by glaring at her (fingers crossed for season seven).  Next time you’re doing housework, imagine her shouting at you and see if you don’t get the job done in half the time.

Let’s run through how six series’ worth of content can be extracted from just one place and yet remain darkly comic and deeply dramatic (the show, that is, not what I’ve written about it; though, maybe…):

Season one

This is our Philosopher’s Stone to Litchfield’s underfunded and corrupt Hogwarts.  Piper walks stubbornly and headfirst into all sorts of unnecessary drama.  Keep an eye out for, basically, everyone, as even that incidental crazy hairy lady in the cubicle becomes a pivotal character over time.  Back on planet Piper, though, where we are forced to go, she realises the ex-lover who got her in the drugs trouble in the first place, Alex, is locked in with her.  Cue LOLs as Piper insists she is engaged to a man (Jason Biggs in various sweaters).  A dramatic arc around naughty guard Mendez supplying drugs to addicts and supplying his tool to other inmates in broom cupboards culminates in a sort-of Christmas special with surprising singing...  In all of this, you find charm and humour, but you’re first exposed to the harsh reality of the show’s treatment of its characters – they are never more than a hair’s breadth from a life of disaster.

Season two

Thinking you’ve got used to things, the first episode disorientates you horribly, as we follow a bewildered Piper around what seems like the whole federal prison system – truly grim.  Back at Litchfield, a new villain, the slimy Vee, is back behind bars, stirring up old tensions and manipulating the black family to grim effect.  We pootle through a lot of the other surrounding characters, but the finale serves up perfect justice.

Season three

Throughout this series, Litchfield is threatened with closure until a private firm buys up the operation.  Conditions deteriorate before and after and the inmates’ growing frustration is palpable.  Piper (oh god, it’s all about her) grows into a role as a bit of a hardass, taking advantage of the prison knicker-sewing industry to set up a little enterprise for herself, despite good friend Nicky Nichols (the wild Natasha Lyonne) getting carted off to max unjustly.

Season four

MCC, the new private owners of Litchfield, double inmate numbers, with bunkbeds being the only infrastructure adjustment.  This brings in a host of new characters, all while we’re still uncovering those that have been there the whole time, such as the Dominican faction and the older ladies.  Litchfield also gets its first celebrity inmate, but, overall, the new guards are too inexperienced and feckless to ensure prisoner safety.  All hell breaks loose.

Season five

This whole series revolves around a riot that bursts out in response to the guard brutality that will cost you one of your favourite characters.  While some prisoners run amok, others stay out of trouble.  Highlights include the emergence of coffee shop culture in the midst of chaos, and the unveiling of the library memorial.  Throughout, you’ll wish the cast dearest to you would behave, as you fear their future punishment and resent how they dehumanise themselves with their behaviour.  Worse still, the riot negotiations constantly dangle a satisfactory conclusion that remains frustratingly out of reach.

Season six

The action moves to maximum security and a whole host of characters never seem to return.  You really miss them, but D and C block are bursting with feisty new ladies (and guards) to help with the loss.  Every riot action, it seems, comes with its consequence, but injustice seems to be the overall response.  A kickball game promises to see a lifelong grudge between two sisters (Carol and Barb) erupt into bloodshed, but it’s the way the prisoners are forced to betray each other that will cause the most pain.

There, you’re all prepared for the journey.  A lot of folk have abandoned Orange Is The New Black midway through a series for its slower pace, but, on reflection, each season does seem to set up, ramp down, and then crescendo perfectly in its thirteen-episode arc.  It’s ruthless with removing characters, but each addition is worth their weight in orange jumpsuit.  Like Lost, each character’s pre-prison life is fleshed out with flashbacks, with one dominating each episode.  My only frustration here is that some of the best ladies never got theirs.  Methhead Angie, like many, comes from the periphery to the fore over the show’s run, but we never find out how she got such bad teeth and why she is constantly a vile mix of naivety, foolishness and sinister selfishness.  Gina, often called the squirrel lady, is another inmate whose crimes I’d love to have seen unpacked.  And finally, Maritza, a Latina whose lines are almost as good as Mendoza’s, is just crying out for more explanation.  Luckily, her story finally does get fleshed out, but I was worried for a long time that it wouldn’t.

Either way, for me, the star of the show becomes Taystee.  At first, she seems like a side-serving of comic relief, but her warmth and conflict is a magnetic force on viewers.  It’s in the riot that she really comes into her own, bringing Caputo onside in a way that proves he is a good man (beer can or not).  While Piper ultimately skips through her Litchfield journey relatively unscathed (minus some teeth chipping, a shit tattoo and some involuntary burning), Taystee is set up to shoulder an ultimate injustice that would be all the more alarming if it didn’t feel so realistic.  I said I loved every minute of Orange Is The New Black, but that can’t be true.  Taystee’s story is not one you can enjoy, but it’s one that everyone needs to see.

Desperate Housewives

Yes, because sometimes we all need the help of our friends.  Yes, because sometimes neighbours become closer than family.  Yes, because sometimes we need to learn that there’s more to life than appearances.  And so on and so forth: these are just some made-up lines from Desperate Housewives because it’s too hot to bother checking for real quotations on the internet and it’s funnier to think of your own.  Each episode in the eight-season run of this classic show drew to its conclusion with omniscient posthumous narrator, Mary Alice Young, saying “yes” in her slow calm voice before passing judgment on the goings on of Wisteria Lane.  Cue a montage of shots featuring each family coming to terms with that episode’s action.

This week I’m delving into an iconic boxset from years ago, just because it’s sometimes nice to be nostalgic.  Yes, because sometimes it’s nice to be nostalgic (oops, Mary Alice-ing again).  In many ways, Desperate Housewives was soap operatic trash, but the clever narrative framing outlined in the previous paragraph gave it an original spin, elevating its suburban banality to high-end drama.  Premiering in 2004, my nineteen-year-old self and all of my new-found nineteen-year-old college buddies at university instinctively knew that this was a big moment in TV.  Any show that opens with the suicide of a lead character is bound to combine enough mystery with enough dark humour to reel in anyone looking for distraction.  We were hooked.

The aesthetic offered great escapism.  There were sunshine-drenched white picket fences, leaned over for the exchanging of gossip by glamorous ladies whose intertwined stories were brought to life in the richly imagined town of Fairview.  Visiting a dear friend in Connecticut years later, I fulfilled a lifetime goal of beholding a place that looked just like Wisteria Lane, alarming locals with my coveting of their garden borders.  The show’s leads ran households, kept down jobs, raised children, drank too much wine, all without a hair out of place.  The perfection on the surface was so clichéd that you knew it would only take a small scratch on the surface to find dystopia beneath.

It was around these secrets that each series was structured.  While some inconsistency abounded in the quality of each mystery, the pacing and cliffhangering kept us coming back for more.  And these were the days before Sky Plus, so we would literally need to convene around someone’s actual television at the pre-ordained time as confirmed by the TV listings page in a newspaper.  There was even a hairy moment during the holidays when everyone with a TV had returned to their regions of origin and those of us remaining behind were forced to use the college TV room in order to keep up with the action.  This was a place best avoided, as it was dominated by chain-smoking communists (this is neither exaggeration nor embellishment) but after a very spirited democratic vote, we managed to enact a change to Channel 4.  Sadly, my year abroad meant I missed the whole second series and have never caught up with it since, but, on reflection, my fluent German is some consolation to me for the fact I never found out who the Applewhite family were keeping in their basement.

But who are these wives, and what about the houses they live in?  What makes them so desperate?  Prepare yourself for a journey through each in turn, peppered with my subjective judgments.

Susan Mayer

Often cited as the lead, mostly because Teri Hatcher had the biggest star power on day one, Susan Mayer was dominated by her endless complicated relationship with Mike Delfino.  At her best, she would be scurrying around her neighbours’ flower beds, mischievously spying, but she never really seemed malicious and was therefore easy to root for.  Her kids were kind of tedious.  I had forgotten about Julie Mayer’s total existence, and Mike Junior got brattier by the episode.  Her rivalry with Edie Britt, however, generated some of the most barbed shade ever committed to dialogue.

Edie Britt

Despite not making it through all the series, let’s deal with this character ahead of the others.  She owned her sexuality, was unashamed to get what she wanted and took advantage of others’ weakness, all while looking banging.  What a hero.  I think we could all learn a thing from Edie.  The show was poorer without her.

Lynette Scavo

This housewife had balls.  When she wasn’t dealing with cancer or suffering an unruly brood of ginger children, she was bossing things in the husband department.  Tom Scavo defined flannel, combining various levels of infidelity with trying to open a stupid pizza restaurant.  I remember she was also committed to recycling during some awkward product placement in series six, but I’ll forgive Felicity Huffman anything.  Anything.

Gabrielle Solis

The bombshell with a lot of the best lines.  Eva Longoria clearly had too much fun rolling around with the gardener, while later series saw her battling with two chubbily cute daughters giving her as much sassmouth as she deserved.  Her partnership with Carlos was tested throughout the show’s lifetime, but his constantly exasperated expressions showed that nobody could resist Gabrielle’s charms.

Brie Van de Kamp

The ur-housewife.  Named after a soft cheese, but with a heart of stone.  Anyone who keeps a household so immaculate has got my respect.  I can barely pick my underpants off the floor at the best of times.  Her devious nature was a delight, yet seeing her terrible children torture her in return was even more gratifying.

Karen McCluskey

I admit that she was never one of the core housewives, mostly appearing to fulfil the recurring role of elderly neighbour.  But this old battleaxe easily outsassed the others.  Straight-talking, self-serving and snarly, she would occasionally melt into such kindness that her steady presence over all eight seasons has earned her a special mention here.

So…  yes, because sometimes it’s important to dwell on the shows that shaped your life.  I still have friendships now based on shared viewership of Desperate Housewives in my student days.  Running all the way to 2012 (though ending up set in 2017 due to a five-year forwards leap that boldly refreshed the character and storyline arcs) the show also featured in my farcical media career, with various brands involved in bidding for its UK broadcast sponsorship back when I was always the last one standing at any free drinks event.  Now I get anxiety if I’m not in bed by 10pm.  Your real life might not necessarily include tornadoes, kidnaps, vengeance, murder or home-making, but Desperate Housewives offered exemplary entertainment and, for that, it must be saluted.  Yes, because sometimes it’s- sorry, I’ll stop that now.

Girls

Whenever a programme starts with that little HBO interstitial where three letters signifying Home Box Office slowly appear on a background of grey fuzz, you know you’re in for a touch of quality.  It’s like the royal seal on a box of Weetabix (although I wouldn’t say that was my favourite cereal).  This is the home of The Wire, True Blood and, er, Sesame Street.  Thus, Girls came with high expectations.  This was compounded by inordinate fuss during its 2012 launch.  During a couple of trips to New York that year, its four lead cast members’ faces were plastered on every bench and phone box I strode past, gormlessly imagining I was in a boxset of my own, what with all the sidewalks, yellow taxis and ironic exclamations of “I’m walkin’ here!” in my best Brooklyn accent.

The internet whinged about nudity and nepotism.  But no TV show has ever needed to please everyone.  Where did all this expectation and entitlement come from?  If anything, we were mirroring exactly the behaviour at the heart and soul of Girls: selfishness.  The four main characters are each so obsessed with themselves that their friendships crash and burn along with most other elements of their lives.  This is real life.  It’s cruel.  I’m writing this because I want people to read it.  You’re reading it in case you can spot that it isn’t any good.  So, when a show is all over the news, everyone has something to say about what’s wrong with it.  If it doesn’t tick all our boxes correctly, then we feel we have the right to be outraged.

But this is all in the past now.  Six seasons of Girls exist out there and if you haven’t watched it, you should.  Later series slipped out with far less attention and the narratives therefore had a chance to blossom and mature with less scrutiny.  After all, everything is someone’s truth (even Bromans).  So let’s talk about Lena Dunham’s truth at the time of its inception: young people coming to terms with adulthood, an unfriendly city that gives you just enough love to keep you in its palm, recalibrating your expectations of what your life will be, wanting to be loved.  Sound familiar?  The comedy and the drama, therefore, come from the characters’ journeys through these truths and the fact they are inevitably at odds with each other.

So who the fudge are these people?:

Hannah Horvath

Hannah is the main girl of Girls, around whom most other girls in the show orbit.  This isn’t due to her magnetic charisma, but because she is raw AF.  She can’t have nice things because she ruins them.  Just when you think she has achieved compassion with someone, she comes out with something that reveals it’s all about her, no matter what.  We all know a Hannah, and we all are a Hannah.  Also, her clothes fall off almost constantly and we just need to make our peace with that.

Marnie Michaels

Growing up impossibly handsome, I can identify with what it’s like to be judged first on breath-taking looks.  Note the irony.  Marnie’s self-obsession is compounded by how others treat her, from a mum who just wants to be her cool friend to men who can’t believe she’ll go near them.  It’s nice to be pretty, but it clearly just leaves you as lost as the rest of us.

Jessa

I’m not putting the surname as I never noticed it once across all 62 episodes, so I can’t be pasting it out of Wikipedia now.  I never really got the purpose of Jessa.  She seems like a lost child from The Osbournes with her transatlantic drawl.  She gives me accent whiplash.  Jessa acts as a filter for the other characters’ wilder acts, the result of lost inhibitions.  I’m torn with saying she’s either the least interesting or the most enigmatic.

Shoshanna Shapiro

By far my favourite girl.  Every line and every word that comes out of her mouth is so well observed that you never want it to end.  She’s the sensible one with actual drive, though she goes through the same challenges that force her to question everything about herself.  I can only imagine how much fun Shosh was for Zosia Mamet to play (an actress who is unrecognisable in Mad Men).  Series 5, episode 3 where we get to see Japan through Shosh’s eyes is one of the most mesmerising and magical things I have ever seen.  I’m smiling as I think about it.

Officially speaking, these four are the actual Girls the titles refers to (I’ve decided).  In addition, there’s a deep and rich supporting cast of awful relations and equally damaged male love interests.  One is now even the naughty Jedi (or something) in the new Star Wars films.  In Girls, Adam Sackler is played by Adam Driver as a fairly grumpy man-child, so it’s great to see him doing the same thing with a light sabre.  But no, I’m just jealous – he’s a very exciting actor and you feel every emotion along with him throughout his relationships with Hannah and others.

But if Shosh has the best lines of any girl in the show, it’s Elijah Krantz who has the best of any boy.  While the girls seem to delude themselves regarding the extent of their self-obsession, Elijah owns his without apology.  Yet, he and Hannah somehow make a shared STI (HPV) seem like a friendship goal.

How can a show about selfishness be gratifying viewing?  I’ve just told you, it has the HBO logo thing at the start.  Plus, it’s only thirty minutes, New York looks beautiful throughout, the soundtrack never misses, it’s funny, it’s sad, it’s realistic and pure fantasy, and it doesn’t really do anything you expect it to.  That, and naked people.