Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

one thing i really really like about orange is the new black is that sky blue title card that let's me know exactly when to stop fast forwarding thru that fucking regina spektor song.

i kinda like it
i like the opening sequence with the faces too

when jason biggs got the script w/ him masturbating did he get sad and think 'this is my life, this is who i am, this will always be who i am' or did he smile and think 'I GOT THIS'?

ha!

but i wish it were less vignette/more throughline story.

It becomes less vignettey by the final quarter of the season, but I'm with you. I sort of get the feeling that the flashbacks are more for establishing characters than a long-term plot device.

i'm really enjoying OITNB but a lot of the supporting characters are pretty cartoony too. i mean i know we aren't supposed to care about the evil guard but he's an EVIL GUARD who's SO EVIL and has a big mustache and is basically out of reno 911. and the one other evil-ish prison administrator has a mustache too, so basically a mustache means you're evil.

haha another contrast w/ oz - flashbacks (so far) on orange are all 'they were led astray by love' and almost every character is nice once you get to know them. meanwhile on oz you get:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXLq8Bi1uRY

I enjoyed the scene with two of the women pretending to be white NPR liberal types but it really just sounded like the writers taking the actors out of character to deliver a routine

Ha n/a I had a similar reaction upthread, but as you get further in the series you'll realize those are the only 2 characters that code evil, there's way more subtle evil waiting to happen.

I pretty much loved everything about orange is the new black with the notable exception of 100% hating the entire terrible love story between guard and prisoner arc.

t really just sounded like the writers taking the actors out of character to deliver a routine
there's a lot of this sort of writerly stuff coming through -- i've even learned to forget about that (and this is a classic thing that would bother me)

The prison guard/inmate romance is dumb, but it's gotta be in there.

I don't mind the Regina Spektor song, having somehow avoided her for as long as she's been steadily getting popular.

also yael stone/morello's accent is amazing, she's australian!

I mean the black-haired Laura Prepon wearing glasses is not hurting my enjoyment of this series either

xpost Yeah, I learned that just the other day!

based on this and oz women's prison looks like much much much easier time than men's prison.

not really a prison expert or w/e but i think the distinction you're actually looking for is minimum security vs maximum security...

also dramedy vs hard melodrama

tobias beecher could've taken a plea bargain and served his sentence in a dramedy, instead chose to go to trial and wound up in a nightmarish soap opera

Laura Prepon's eyebrows are pretty crazy

I'm watching Takedowns & Falls - high school wrestling documentary that's pretty good.

1statethyr - oz was an experimental unit, decidedly not max security, hence ppl getting sent to gen pop when they, um, actually it was never remotely clear wtf you had to do to get booted from oz.

Also, Oz was straight fiction, but Orange is based on someone's memoir.

Didn't the Washington Post or some paper do a piece on how Orange gets prison remarkably right, supposedly?

in the first ep the one administrator guy is all dont worry women's prison isn't as bad as men's, on the other hand hes portrayed as an idiot, on the other hand it kinda stands to reason

i like how some of the lesser plpt development on the show are left understated, like when when 70s show Donna is getting starved by red youre all oh shit its her turn now but then the next scene shes all man I had to massage reds feet gross and you realize piper made the whole thing way more difficult for herself than it needed to be, but they don't play that revelation up at all

also how temporary roommates tell her theyll prob put her in the suburbs but then she ends up in the hood, and its obvs they gave her spot to the girl who couldn't get along w pipers new Haitian old lady roommate but its not explicitly explained

well i do remember reading that oz was kinda unrealistically bleak, that any prison that had prisoners shivved that routinely would get shut down quickly. at the same time the whole first episode i was tense until the schmuck admin guy literally said 'don't worry, this isn't oz' and even after i was still viewing thru that prism. when the cartoonish bad guy poor xian girl locked laura prepon in the dryer and prepon was just 'o you bitch!' aftewards i was like 'man, adebisi would not stand for that shit at all'. i think if i'd watched prison break i'd probably just be thinking 'wtf, just break out already'.

so much shanking in oz

experimental shanking wing

it's a really good show but there's a weird disconnect bw the realism of the setting and how TV the characters are. but that's more of a problem with TV in general than OITNB specifically.

dramedy is tricky

haitian old lady my fave i think, character and performance. i haven't finished the season yet though. if this thing goes more than two seasons i'd like season two to wrap up artisanal soap girl's story and then maybe season 3 or even part of season 2 do the same format w/ a more representative of prison experience type character. show either needs to wrap quickly and have it be the story of this white chick's book or whatever or go pretty long and get at how bleak and genuinely life consuming prison is, characters continually getting hopes up to have them broken, characters cycling in and out.

Also, Oz was straight fiction, but Orange is based on someone's memoir.
Yeah, a memoir where she had a druggy ex-boyfriend, not an ex-girlfriend who could conveniently show up in jail with her.

lagoon, you are a treat

"Didn't the Washington Post or some paper do a piece on how Orange gets prison remarkably right, supposedly?"

i posted a link to it somewhere on this thread. good article!

man I guess I should watch this huh

at least two of Netflix's "originals" are orange-themed (Arrested Development, OITNB)

curious orange (netflix)

this chicken ep lmao

i actually haven't seen oz, seems like a miserable show, so i'm just going off wikipedia here but oz is short for "oswald maximum security penitentiary". i guess it takes place in an experimental unit but it's still all prisoners who would be in a maximum security prison. a minimum security facility like the one in oitnb just isn't gonna be full of violent offenders. a maximum security women's prison might not be as bad as a maximum security men's prison but the diff is probably not as stark as the diff between oitnb and oz. anyway yeah, oitnb is great

"Yeah, a memoir where she had a druggy ex-boyfriend, not an ex-girlfriend who could conveniently show up in jail with her."

Wait what? I thought the fiction here was that they were assigned to the same prison not that it was a druggy ex-girlfriend?

Piper Kerman is an American memoirist whose experiences in prison provided the basis for the comedy-drama series Orange Is the New Black.

Kerman graduated from Smith College, in 1992. In 1993, she became entangled with Vauess, a woman who dealt heroin for a West African kingpin.[1][2] She laundered money for the operation.[1]

She moved to San Francisco, where she met Larry Smith; they moved to New York City. In 1998, she was indicted for money laundering and drug trafficking and subsequently pled guilty.[1] Beginning in 2004, she served 13 months of a 15 month sentence at FCI Danbury, a minimum security prison located in Danbury, Connecticut.[3]

Real happy couple picture, taken in prison visiting rom:
http://images.nymag.com/images/2/daily/2010/03/20100325_piper2_250x375.jpg

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2010/03/piper_kerman.html

To digress for a second, I started watching a UK series called Hit & Miss, with Chloe Sevigny as a transsexual contract killer who becomes the guardian of a bunch of kids. It is excellent except for Chloe Sevigny.

oh i was wrong

To digress for a second, I started watching a UK series called Hit & Miss, with Chloe Sevigny as a transsexual contract killer who becomes the guardian of a bunch of kids. It is excellent except for Chloe Sevigny.

― Tottenham Heelspur (in orbit), Monday, August 5, 2013 7:37 AM (11 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh yeah? i avoided it because the scenario was kind of like

Pitch TV drama ideas that involve Dean Gaffney

Arbitrage is pretty good

House I Live In is very good. Even though the material is largely old hat for me (prison-industrial complex, mandatory minimums, powder-crack ratios, etc.) there was still stuff to learn -- in particular the stuff about how meth is changing the racial dynamics of the drug war -- and it's well done and moving.

i hadn't heard of that but i will watch it. thanks hurting

Also it has kind of a unified theory of race and the drug war that I've never heard put together before. Hard to say whether the theory is 100% on point or not, but was pretty interesting.

Been watching Murder in Suburbia, which has a bizarre comedic tone for a show about police who investigate murders, but is strangely compelling. And To the Ends of the Earth, mostly because it has a lot of Benedict Cumberbatch, but also takes place entirely at sea. Holding off on Orange is the New Black for now.

after years, it seems, of just offering the xmas special or whatever it was, the full league of gentlemen is up now. been happily rewatching.