It’s Time to Kill ‘Orange Is The New Black’
With the 5th season of ‘Orange Is The New Black’ now available on Netflix, it is more apparent now than ever that the Emmy-winning series has run out of fuel.
WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for seasons 4 and 5 of Orange Is The New Black.
I was a dedicated fan of Jenji Kohan’s Netflix hit, Orange Is The New Black (OITNB). It combines two of my favorite things: fighting the system and lesbians.
After watching the final episodes of Season 4, though, I was infuriated. The death of Poussey hit me like a brick; how could the writers not only perpetuate the infamous “Bury Your Gays” trope by killing Poussey, a lesbian who had finally found the love she had desired for so long, but mimic Eric Garner’s tragic death on screen? Talk about killing two minorities with one stone. And then they have the audacity to frame C.O Bailey, who suffocated Poussey, as somebody innocent — somebody who is a mere victim of poor training and deserves sympathy. How dare they.
But I’ve never been good at boycotting, so I watched Season 5 anyway. I needed to see C.O Bailey get locked up. I needed to see change. I needed to avenge Poussey’s death. I needed closure.
What I got instead was an abandonment of pre-established character traits, the most unrealistic depiction of prison I’ve ever seen, and a blur of moral messages.
The idea that has been pushed by OITNB ever since its inception is that the majority women in prison are genuinely good people who just made bad decisions. Poussey — bless her heart — describes this perfectly in Season 1, Episode 7:
We are all just in here because we took the wrong turn going to church.
Season 5, however, seems to directly counter this sentiment. While the two guards who have actually slowly and painfully killed inmates — C.O Bailey and C.O Piscatella — get sob stories, the guards who have done nothing of the sort get publicly sodomized, humiliated, held at gunpoint and shot by the (primarily Latina) inmates with zero remorse from anybody except for Piper and Alex.
“But Anna”, I hear you say as if we’re on a first-name basis, “Is there really such a thing as a prison guard who has done nothing wrong?” The Stanford Prison Experiment suggests not. But if anybody should be concerned about cruel & unusual punishment, it should be the inmates. These women were good people. They were mere victims of their circumstances. They meant no harm unto anybody. But when it comes to treating people like caged animals, the morals that have been established in the 4 seasons prior are apparently out the window.
Several terrifying aspects of the riot are a source of comedy to the writers, not an area of moral conflict. A guard being reduced to hysterics because he can’t go to the bathroom in a communal bucket is funny. An inmate handcuffing herself to a staff member so she doesn’t get shot on sight is funny. “Little More” by Eric Hutchinson, a particularly cheery-sounding song, plays over the sobs of a hostage trapped in a porta potty, her wrists zip-tied. Yes, the lyrics aren’t so cheery, but if OITNB was realistic, this moment would be horrifying, not an opportunity for comedic irony.
That brings me to my next point. Piper Kerman’s book on which OITNB is based aims to describe U.S. prisons in a realistic and meaningful way. Season 5, on the other hand, reduces prison riots to “baristas serving cold brew, [and] bloggers offering beautification seminars”, in the words of The New York Times writer Kathryn Shattuck. When asked what the message of this portrayal was, Jenji Kohan, the show’s creator, responded:
We wanted to follow what we thought would be a natural progression of the riot, and we had done research into other ones. They were mostly men’s riots. But we were going to take the information and see how it would be different in our environment and how it would be the same.
So, women can’t riot like men? Kohan continues:
And there are moments, I think, where it gets a little domestic when they’re in charge, which I don’t think is as common in men’s.
This is odd to me. Another central message of the show is that a woman can do anything a man can, right? Is this not inclusive of violent rioting?
Here’s a recap for you: The inmates are heartless enough to torture innocent guards, but they’re too female to be outwardly violent; in other words, they’re only violent when it’s unnecessary. This contradicts everything we’ve learned over the course of the show.
I’ve never been to prison. I don’t know what a prison riot is like. But anybody with a lick of sense knows that it’s probably not like the one in Season 5 of OITNB, even if all of the prisoners are women. Two escapes and two (accidental) casualties? These women can do better than that.
OITNB espouses the principle of “taking the high road”, but only when it makes little sense to do so. Is the show trying to make us feel bad for guards that have killed inmates? As aforementioned, Piscatella and Bailey both get sad flashbacks in a half-assed attempt by OITNB to have a “Murderers — they’re just like us!” moment. Even though Piscatella killed an inmate and tortured six others, he gets a “gay man who has to hide his love from others” storyline, as if the audience should somehow feel bad for him. Even though Bailey murdered Poussey, he gets a “just a kid whose life is now ruined” storyline. Listen, I get it. Good people can do bad things. That’s what I said about the inmates. But that’s the thing; they’re inmates. Most of them are in prison because they earned it. Bailey should be in prison, and it seems like OITNB’s sympathy-mongering is trying to convince us otherwise.
Is OITNB trying to tell us that, even if you’re Latina, it’s good to cooperate with Neo-Nazis? In the last episode, several Latina characters team up with the white supremacists in order to ward off the SWAT team. Violent racists and people of color don’t just “work together” when a common goal is in order, and they shouldn’t have to. This is just one of the many, many painful reminders 14 of 16 OITNB writers are white.
I’ll give the show this. Many aspects of the protest were true to life — prison administrators don’t want to negotiate fairly with prisoners, prisoners are killed unjustly, and prison guards get on power trips. But we’ve already heard this narrative. If you only saw season one you know these things. Hell, if you’ve never seen the show and just read the book you know these things. While framing it in a different scenario — in this case, a prison riot — is a great idea in and of itself, it was ultimately undermined by its execution.
It’s not like OITNB didn’t have problems before the 4th and 5th seasons, including bisexual erasure (Piper), ableism (calling Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” out of context with the show), etc. But Season 5 was a step beyond all of that. Season 5 was my breaking point.
By the end of the season, C.O Bailey remains free and the inmates’ demands remain unmet. All I ask for Season 6 is that Bailey is imprisoned and Poussey earns her justice — because Season 5 most definitely didn’t give her any.
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