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

it begins. what a perfect weekend for me to be too broke to go out!

the end of last season felt kinda wish-fulfillment/fan-servicey, so in other words more like jenji kohan's previous, risible show, but i like (most of) these characters too much to not be interested in the show. also, mary steenburgen!!

I'm going to attempt to just watch one episode of this per week (after beginning with a twofer) this year. Will I fail? Probably, but it's a thing I'm trying. Hopefully I'll see this thread again in 12 weeks.

Never watched this show, but I've just found out my friend Nick appears in the sexual harassment video* in ep 7 this season.

*Which is a real corporate video he acted in around six years ago.

And of course his wife went on youtube, found the original video, and shared it on FB

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L9xyFKD8HE&feature=youtu.be&t=480

He's the impressively coiffed uncomfortable dude in the white shirt in the preview frame.

Wait, Steenburgen is in this season? She was just in all last season of "Justified." There should be a statute of limitations between appearances as a high profile season-long guest star.

Huh, just out of curiosity I looked her up to figure out why she was famous, because to the best of my memory she never anchored a major/hit movie or TV show. I still don't know, but I was surprised to learn she won an Oscar 35 years ago for "Melvin and Howard!" The world is full of surprises.

timehump chronicles

admiral rodcocker for prez

so this show has always been somewhat silly but god this season it got really really silly

I had the suspicion that Chang's backstory would be good, and it really was.

This fruit. Is defective.

steenburgen was in some woody allen films and has been a reliable character/side player for years; plus lengthy high profile Ted Danson liberal power couple for a long time (although I think they divorced), were in Curb your Enthusiasm a fair bit for a while. I used to have a mad crush on her.

She used to be married to Malcolm McDowell back in the 80s.

http://images.bwwstatic.com/upload10/633048/tn-500_steenburgen_mcdowell_wm1.jpg

(although I think they divorced)

Don't tell Ted Danson.

for various reasons i was not very into this season but i did watch it all in three days despite an imminent deadline so more fool me

I've watched the first episode (after watching previous 2 seasons) and found it not to my liking. I'll give it another chance, just wish they weren't trying to squeeze messages into every available spot.

I did enjoy hearing the song again :-/

TRAPPED TRAPPED TRAPPED TILL THE CAGE IS FULL!

it's still often funny and i liked the various backstories (despite the blunt moral resonance thing) but it was a bit of a problem that all of the ongoing storylines were too silly or annoying to care about. if next season they ditch all semblance of plot then it'll be fine.

first ep of this season is one of the best they've ever done imo (and my easy fave of the 6 I've seen so far)

"russians stay focused"

it is pretty sitcom-y this season. there was some heavy stuff happening in the first two seasons! but i haven't watched it all yet. maybe it gets heavier. a regular yukfest. can't say the sitcom-y stuff like bedbugs and drunk squirrels was that great, but still lots of great individual funny lines.

animal animal animal animal animal animal animal

i watched the first two episodes and it's a bit boring to me this season. I enjoyed the gratuitous sex scene between piper and alex though because who wouldn't.

alex is such a bore. i like how demented piper looks this season.

now that i finished it, i changed my mind
i love this show
also it got a lot easier to ffwd through the opening credits, no?

Think I said it earlier, but this show is basically "M*A*S*H."

I gave up on my plan to just watch 1 per week, and ended up binging through several episodes last night. Finished off with 'Ching Chong Chang,' which was basically the first actually good episode of the season. I've been warned to brace myself for the finale because it jumps the shark really hard. I'm not surprised if that's true, because this season SUUUUUUUUUX.

Chang is the shit

Lots of great characters individually. Don't really care about the narrative arc of the show tbh. I don't care about acting very much but Taryn Manning was great. If Brittany Murphy were still alive she would've totally been on this show.

I've had that thought, too.

I mean I got no problems with jenji kohan but her shows do seem to peter out after awhile. then again I always thought weeds was mediocre and then it got utterly execrable, whereas OITNB was spectacular in long stretches of seasons 1 and 2, so the "ehhhhhhh"-ness of this one bums me out more

then again it's a quasi mainstream program tackling prison privatization so I can't really be mad at that at end of day.

So many things about this season I hated, and so few that I liked.

Piper was always a fucking joke, but the shit is just comical at this point. Wasn't just her, though. No one had a story this year that wasn't just aimless and stupid, except for Doggett's and Cindy's (which were horrifying and touching, respectively). Also, wtf with Nicky/Natasha Lyonne? I mean, you don't send anyone up to max and expect them to come back, so is she gone from the show? If so, AW HELL NO.

At least Alex is probably fucking dead now, thank goodness.

I guess I'd walk back the blanket "aimless and stupid" accusations for things like Soso and Chang, and Sophia too (although she shouldn't have been feeding Michael that bad advice and then expect him not to use it). But the whole Dia baby Bennett and Pornstache's mom will she/won't she thing was terrible, and Susanne's erotica storyline was just silly and especially all the stuff about Norma and her followers was beyond my will to roll along with whatever happens. And when Lori Petty turned out to just be a tinfoil hat nutjob I was super disappointed.

it's a quasi mainstream program tackling prison privatization so I can't really be mad at that at end of day.

True, I guess. And casting Bibiglia as the wishy washy middle manager was perfect, because he's a smackable kind of guy.

I wonder what Chang actually got sent to prison for, probably not for ordering a murder. Maybe just the animal part smuggling?

for being an accessory to murder?

those guys didn't seem like criminal masterminds and probably kidnapping and killing some normal guy is not the easiest thing to get away with.

But the whole Dia baby Bennett and Pornstache's mom will she/won't she thing was terrible
will she/won't she give the baby to rich not-grandma was not the point of that story, at least as far as i could tell. from my perspective it was about Daya and her mom, who was an interesting character too. i also thought Cesar was someone we don't see much in tv but who i've known irl. all of that family, really. one of the things i liked a lot about the show is how it showed differences between individual people rather than monolithic ethnic groups (or the even broader group of "women in prison") i also loled when someone referred to Daya as the one who looks like a goldfish. that was hilarious and otm even if i can't remember exactly which goldfish she looks like.

similarly, the magic norma subplot wasn't about norma, but belief and faith (leanne, etc), orthodoxy, etc. again, from my perspective.

natasha lyonne's disappearance was a disappointment, but also i think it served to bring the viewer closer to the other characters. she can suck up all the air in a room. the australian woman was pretty but i didn't really enjoy her subplot much. did not need to see caputo doing it with fig though.

norma is my guru

will she/won't she give the baby to rich not-grandma was not the point of that story, at least as far as i could tell. from my perspective it was about Daya and her mom, who was an interesting character too. i also thought Cesar was someone we don't see much in tv but who i've known irl. all of that family, really. one of the things i liked a lot about the show is how it showed differences between individual people rather than monolithic ethnic groups (or the even broader group of "women in prison") i also loled when someone referred to Daya as the one who looks like a goldfish. that was hilarious and otm even if i can't remember exactly which goldfish she looks like.

similarly, the magic norma subplot wasn't about norma, but belief and faith (leanne, etc), orthodoxy, etc. again, from my perspective.

I agree with all of this, but I just think a little would've gone a long way and a lot was too much.

wow I just finished it! Way less plot/conflict/narrative arc driven than the first 2 seasons and way more day-to-day character-focused goings-on. I didn't dislike it, though! But I was surprised the tone shifted so much. The Australian was such a weird red herring, like she just showed up out of NOWHERE and was barely in it and wasn't even sinister enough to be mysterious; she just felt totally and completely out of place. I loved that Lori Petty wound up being harmless especially the at first subtle and then increasingly heavy handed hints at her being some v scary figure.

Also I am strangely hating Piper less and less now that she's dropped this whole precious yuppie thing and is actually like a rly vengeful and shitty person!

Did this season have any legit villains besides the awful donut dude?

the real villain was BIG BUSINESS

Looooved the Lori petty character

I'd been wondering if my broken affect was hampering my enjoyment of this season, but apparently lots of people were bored by it.

All "whom will Piper smooch" storylines are terrible, but I actually liked parts of her rise to kingpin status, as some twisted version of American entrepreneurial mythology.

I thought that Lolly was playing a long game by pretending to be schizo and confronting Alex to assess her kung fu skills, and then turn out to be an assassin after all. But yeah, her apparent death did some to be sealed for a while.

Soso's OD was hard to take.

Flaca looks good in pigtails.

I still feel that the show doesn't really doesn't do a great job at expressing the normalized degradation of prison life -- I always think of Litchfield as a weirdly oppressive summer camp with remote/authoritative camp counselors, since the inmates are so often up to goofy hijinks, some of which look genuinely fun -- only with occasional explosions of violence.

Cindy's conversion discussion with the rabbi was pretty cool, though.

i loved the Cindy plotline and thought it paid off well in the finale. hated piper + alex for almost the entire season - but i liked at the end when piper set up the australian tattoo artist and acted all cold + villainous. i'm excited for what seems like them doubling the cast w/ all the new inmates? glad bennett is gone - what a shit storyline that is. for some reason had a particularly hard time buying the prison this season - it seems like the inmates are pretty much allowed to go wherever they want whenever they want. they're gardening, doing personal cooking projects in the kitchen, writing erotica in the bunks (i cannot believe that they let the inmates walk around w/ pens -- and not just any inmate but crazy eyes!). in some ways (like the doggett storyline) the show feels brutally honest, but against this backdrop of a totally fantastical setting. it's a weird thing to reconcile.

just a few more words on the Cindy plotline bc i was pretty turned off to it in the beginning - it seemed like a kinda cheap joke at the expense of jewishness (all these obviously gentile women lying about being jews so they could eat frozen meals), and even when the show was trying to demonstrate that Cindy was a bit more committed to it than the other participants, i didn't completely buy it. it seemed so 'jewfacey' w/ her dropping random yiddish words and references - and maybe even doubly-offensive since the humor seemed to come from the big black woman pretending to be jewish as though that was funny in-and-of-itself. but then she started speaking sincerely about her relationship to jewishness during her conversion talk w/ the rabbi and i really bought it and got onboard. her rejection of jesus and the afterlife in favor of community + working in this world resonated w/ me and even though the conversion process that the show demonstrates is totally bogus (some rando rabbi giving her the go-ahead and then her dipping on her own), i liked it and i really loved her mikvah immersion scene. if she wants a full conversion she'd have to go through a more intensive process probably after getting out, but from my pov afaic fictional character Cindy is a member of the tribe.

the conversion process that the show demonstrates is totally bogus (some rando rabbi giving her the go-ahead and then her dipping on her own)

You get what you get in a prison, I guess?

no, for sure, but the Rabbi sitting there and being all, "ask me again," and then saying "yes," and that being enough except that she needed to dip in a mikvah -- i mean at least ime that is a fictional, truncated representation of how conversion works and a rabbi would be pretty irresponsible to imply that it was sufficient for her to convert.