Orange Is the New Black: Season 1 (2013)

The latest series from Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, is based on Piper Kerman’s 2010 memoir of the same name, which details her experience as an inmate of FCI Danbury (here FCI Litchfield) over 2004-2005. Kerman was born and raised in one of America’s richest families – a  member of the 1% - and her crime was committed some time before her sentence, when she briefly and incidentally participted in an international narcotics ring by way of her then-girlfriend. By the time she was brought to trial, she had returned to America, got engaged and returned to her privileged roots, meaning that incarceration was perhaps even more shocking than it would have been had she been arrested at the time. And Orange is the New Black derives a great deal of its drama, discomfort and comedy from that shock, as Piper, now Piper Chapman, finds herself inserted into an exploitation prison drama that she never entirely distinguishes from a series played for her own benefit, wandering through an astonishing number of charismatic subplots and character actors in a deadpan, dissociative haze. At the most basic level, it’s the shock of a privileged white aristocrat being forced to live among African-American and Hispanic populations for the first time in her life – whiteness registering itself as a minority – and that means that Piper is as irritating as she is sympathetic, entitled as she is endearing, which helps keep the series on its toes, jumping from high drama to bathos in a single breath. It’s also what prevents the prison, and the peculiar palette of the prison, feeling too circumscribed – if anything, the confinement and claustrophobia works well with the Netflix distribution model, serving up Piper’s supposedly interminable sentence in one go, making you feel how efficiently prison time erodes any attempt to episodise it, or to break it down into manageable segments. For the most part, the incredible ensemble cast gives itself over to prison in much the same way that Netflix demands you give yourself over to its series-events – even more so than House of Cards, it operates as a thirteen-hour movie rather than television per se, extending and modulating exploitation drama in ever more ingenious, insidious and irreverent ways. That might sound like a female version of Oz, or Prison Break, but Kohan’s sensibility is too wryly attuned to sitcom to allow that level of gravitas to last for very long – as in the early seasons of Weeds, you sense a sitcom somehow lurks beneath it all, waiting for the right moment to come into its own.