Orange Is the New Black: Season 3 (2015)

As OITNB evolves with each season, it becomes more of an ensemble drama, with Piper blending further into the prison community and even the apparently minor or peripheral characters given interesting backstories and subplots. Admittedly, in season 2, the Vee subplot prevented that ensemble expanding quite as much as it might have, but season 3 announces its intent by opening with a series of more or less ambient episodes revolving around prison-wide events – a visiting day for inmates’ daughters, a bed bug infestation – that allow Jenji Kohan to fully sink us back into what often feels like the most fully realised lifeworld in the last decade of television, big enough to contain every other series. Of course, a couple of season-long arcs do gradually emerge, several involving Piper, but this season still really feels like the definitive moment at which Piper ceases to be the main character, partly because her home life also starts to recede further and further into the background, creating a kind of reverse culture shock on the one occasion when her family come to visit (Jason Biggs isn’t even in it any more). As a result, the other inmates don’t feel positioned or defined relative to Piper any more, but more relative to the prison itself, and in particular with respect to their workspaces, which means that this often feels like a workplace drama more than a prison drama. It feels right, then, that the major plot events are all driven by the corporatisation of the prison, which leads, among other things, to the inmates being given new work duties in a makeshift sweatshop, and the prison employees being forced to give up their benefits and submit to part-time labour even while they’re required to supervise – there’s no money in the budget for proper training – a new batch of incompetent  part-time employees. As their sense of entrapment starts to converge, it gradually feels as if the guards and prisoners are more or less inhabiting the prison in the same way, which is perhaps why the prison feels both more constrained and more expansive than in previous seasons, more dystopian in some ways but also more ripe for a utopian solidarity between prisoners and guards that concludes with the most incredible and rousing sequence in the series to date, something like a vision of how the last day of neoliberalism might look and feel. It also makes for a season that’s particularly preoccupied with conversion and changes of heart, as the employees’ efforts to unionise mirror the inmates’ competing efforts to create a legitimate, formally recognised religious institution and then recruit other inmates to their cause. In both cases, you sense that each character has the interests of the group at heart in a new way, which creates an incredible sense of synergy, an assemblage drama more than an ensemble drama, driven by profoundly comic acts of generosity that often emerge at the most unexpected moments and junctures. And the great satire of the season is the way in which the corporate representative – the perky, “accessible” Director of Human Resources – tries and fails to tap into that synergistic energy, as the prisoners and guards create a kind of anti-corporation that leaves him delightfully baffled, if not defeated, paving the way for what promises to be an even darker and funnier fourth season.