A thread for Netflix's women-in-prison dramedy ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK

my week's been so busy that I haven't been able to watch the last two episodes. it's driving me crazyyyyy.

i think this season has been very strong, but the part of me that wants my favorite characters to experience only sunshine and rainbows is suffering. taystee and poussey :( vee exploiting suzanne's loyalty :( :(

i'm still not a big piper-fan, but in several episodes they've used her very judiciously as comic relief, and that's my favorite version of her. loved her asking healy to put alex on her call list and hurriedly clarifying "IT'S NOT A LESBIAN THING!"

Poussey was definitely the S2 mvp, though Suzanne is a close second.

otm.

no way bank robbers are cool

well, vee was a pretty imposing, significant character, and that actress really inhabited the role. she might be mvp.

Rosa good too, but didn't steer any part of the story besides her own.

didn't steer

See what I did there? lol

http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/film/2014/06/11/where-the-fuck-are-all-the-guards-an-ex-con-reviews-orange-is-the-new-black/#.U5n43Wk51y0.twitter

haha great link - "There’s a putt-putt golf course near my house with more security than this prison."

what bugs me about that article is the ex-con clearly recognizes what dramatic license is because she outright acknowledges it a few times, yet then dismisses it.

NAH MAN, ALL THE SHOW SHOULD BE IS ABOUT PROCESSING, PAPERWORK, AND GUARDS HANDLING SEMI-AGGRAVATING SITUATIONS IN A BUREAUCRATIC WAY.

I mean I'm not going to pretend to know what prison is like and I'll take her word but the whole 'wow I hate that a scripted television show has snappy dialogue' is disingenuous baloney

that was a great article. "But some people wanted to get sent to solitary because they felt threatened or unsafe." this is a key line, and something i always figured would be appealing to a lot of prisoners.

She's obviously watching the show through her own filter, but I enjoy reading things like that. If someone made a show about pizza delivery or a job in a cellphone insurance call center, I'd relish the opportunity to be hyper critical.

sure, tv shows have license to be dramatic, but it's valuable to hear someone "call bullshit" on unrealistic aspects.

sure, when they're talking about how the security seems to be missing at key moments (which was a fair point), not "wow some of the dialogue is really witty, I don't know that all prisoners would talk like that" or "most people's flashbacks would be eight seconds, not all people are this complicated!". (presumably those people are the ones that get no camera time OHHHH REBUTTED!)

maybe I'm still smarting from listening to a guy whine about Dark Knight Rises 'plausability' because he didn't understand the concept of an unreliable narrator in cinema

eh, different strokes. i'm glad to hear how the show is different from real prison (i guess msnbc's lockdown is most realistic? not sure; they edit for drama, too, i imagine).

OK, I’m going to call bullshit on this entire scene. Find me the prison where they send the rapist who just got processed to deliver the food to the women. Please. They have to at least pretend to give a shit about your safety, you know? Also, are all the guards asleep here? She just gives the dude her damn panties and a note to another inmate in the middle of everything. No attempt at hiding anything.

I think they're saying he’s actually a hitman and not a rapist.

Are you fucking brain-damaged, dude? Do you think that makes this more believable?

lol

wait, who was whining about the dark knight rises' "plausibility"?

i remember slate used to do 'roundtables' for the big shows where they'd have some vague experts discuss the show every week (they still do it only w/ pop crits which isn't the same), one season they had psychiatrists which was ok but one season w/ the sopranos they did it w/ seasoned mob journalists and those dudes were great w/ the 'o yeah that's dead on' and 'that would never happen'. this precedes that but i know that apparently enough ppl 'in the know' hectored david chase about tony wearing shorts at a cookout, something a boss would NEVER do apparently, that he felt the need to address it in the show.

wait, who was whining about the dark knight rises' "plausibility"?

― Daniel, Esq 2, Thursday, June 12, 2014 7:30 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a whole buncha nerds I knew who were apparently ok with the villain in Batman Begins knocking people out with magic insane-gas and a dude performing feats of strength in a bat outfit but had problems with things like "there's no way he made it 6 miles away from the blast radius when the nuke exploded" or "why wouldn't the dude in the prison have said Talia was really the other person to escape!"

but anyway to clarify above I wasn't taking issue w/ her commenting on the realism of prison cos I do find that interesting (I kept wondering how the hell the cop and Diaz kept hangin out together without anybody besides her 'family' catching wise), just the bits where she criticized the dialogue/characters - of course the dialogue has to be more interesting than real life's banalities!

I really enjoyed the elderly prisoners, sad they didn't get more time

prison seems, by its nature, to be beyond real-life's banalities, if only because people are constantly in danger.

but i read some guy, who writes for vice and was frequently locked-up because of a drug problem, saying that prison wasn't as bad as you'd think. that's "fwiw," obv.

a friend of mine who did some time says jail is much worse than prison

i'm hoping one w/ octopus tattoo gets more play next season, she was badass, hopefully it turns out she was a bank robber too

say did those mafiosos comment on whether the whole 'cunnilingus' thing was really such a hot button in the mob?

I still wanna know what Norma did!

i can't remember but that seems plausible to me, i've known plenty of dudes who don't eat pussy and it's always been a weird machismo thing. tried to find the sopranos roundtable but slate was no help. i remember sudhir venkatesh doing something similar w/ real corner kids and the wire and them pretty much concurring iirc.

'cunnilingus' ... really such a hot button

high five

I'm surprised to find that Healey might be the funnest character for me in the second season. Everyone else is just so humane and sad, while he is pathetic, he is also consistently a fool. The best is him saying (aprox): 'The thing about women is making them think you're meeting them halfway, when in fact you're only meeting them ten to fifteen percent of the way. Always remember: Women are really bad at math!'

Regarding the guy that wrote the column for Vice, I heard that New York state, where he did his time, has prisons that are way less violent and more humane than almost anywhere else in the country.

fwiw, this is that guy's twitter feed. from there, he linked to his articles in vice about prison life. interesting reading.

second installment of that An Ex-Con Reviews Orange Is the New Black series. good reading.

I hope they'll keep this up for all of S2, but it seems like she's said all she wants to say.

it has made me reevaluate the show, to be honest. but on the other hand, i asked this question upthread (i.e., "how realistic is oitnb?") and some posters here said it isn't that far from reality. i'm sure things vary considerably, prison-to-prison, regionally, or even within a facility.

There aren't many (if any) scripted dramas I watch for the reality they attempt to portray. I watch them for the writing and the cast (both of which OITNB is excellent at). If I want to peep into real prison life, I'll watch Frontline or something.

yeah I would imagine it's somewhat difficult to say consistently how prison life is as I imagine it varies. there were some articles that said minimum security prison life is far worse than depicted on OITNB in some places, too.

but obv some of the stuff is going to be off regardless...it's television, not a prison simulator video game (tho that would be awesome).

xpost

prison simulator video game

POOT STINKUM: DOOKPOCALYPSE

I wonder how a real Jack Bauer feels about 24

CARS DON'T EXPLODE *THAT* WAY!!!

nothing about 24 is realistic. let me explain, by way of this 250-page treatise i've written on restaurant napkins . . .

srs question but why is gum contraband in prison? I think they explained it but I probably missed it

Found this on a site about prison contraband...

Gum – A simple stick of chewing gum may not seem nefarious on the face of it. However, its existence in our facilities poses a grave danger. There's nothing quite as unobtrusive as gum on a lock. Yet when a door becomes inoperable it is, in effect, a wall. If you look hard enough in 2012, you will find gum in your facility. Applied to the right lock at the right time, it is a very dangerous commodity.

hm. a partner i used to work for at "biglaw" once said, holding a ketchup bottle, that anything can be used as a deadly weapon.

he was an editor on the yale law journal.

God I love this show so hard. This season started off VERY slowly for me, though, with the whole Stupid Piper thing leaving a stink that stayed for several episodes (seriously, does Larry's dad hate her so much that he wouldn't warned her about the Vausability about not being 100% truthful? OK w/e water under the creek), but once it focused on THE ISSUES (with the compassionate release, and then the nun's story with the forced feeding, which I think was a pulled punch since we didn't get to see it but that way lies torture pr0n) it became extremely powerful.

PS Flaca is a total babe.

Also, why didn't Fig claim some kind of sexual harassment against what's his name to save her job?

i don't think she really wanted to keep it - better to get out with a recommendation than stick around knowing everybody's got something on her

then the nun's story with the forced feeding, which I think was a pulled punch since we didn't get to see it but that way lies torture pr0n

fwiw a) p sure they don't actually force-feed prisoners, they hook em up to Total Parenteral Nutrition and b) i think they made reference to this? red makes some comment about the sister having IVs in her arm or something

i don't think she really wanted to keep it - better to get out with a recommendation than stick around knowing everybody's got something on her

Yeah, I guess easier to slink away. Still, thought she'd be petty enough to try to drag Beer Can Caputo down with her.

she was facing prison and got to slink away w/ a recommendation