Orange Is The New Black Review

Netflix recently released season four of Orange Is The New Black, the hit series based on the true life story of Piper Kerman. The series follows Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) during her 15-month sentence at Litchfield Penitentiary, a minimum security women’s prison.

The series has become Netflix’s most viewed original series, and received a great deal of acclaim. Rightly so, as the show depicts with amazing grace and subtlety the complex human relationships between diverse and original characters. Race, gender, sexuality and body types are represented fairly and without condescension. The first two or three episodes are probably the weakest, however it is the character development that makes it, and each season has grown stranger and stronger as the characters grow and the audience gets to know them better.

For the sake of avoiding spoilers I won’t go into specifics, but is it safe to say that the relationships and feuds between the groups and individuals are both intense and hilarious. In fact, is overwhelmingly refreshing to see a programme that both invokes emotion with ease and is also astoundingly funny. What can sometimes seem sticky in other programmes (the cheesy monologues, the cringe-worthy one liners) is carried out with powerful frankness and sensitivity, with real feeling by much-loved and superbly acted characters, who don’t seem distant or forced as can sometimes happen.

What strikes me as an audience member is that not once has a character done something that was completely out of character. That is not to say there hasn’t been twists and turns, but the mistake TV writers all too often make is making characters act in a way that an audience who has followed them and invested in them knows they wouldn’t. It is that which ruins programmes, two or three seasons down the line, as characters become less rounded and lovable. The actions and reactions have remained continuously human and – at their core – understandable, although sometimes shocking or on the surface cruel.

But what is the most important quality in Orange Is the New Black is its amazing scope for representation. It represents all groups of people in a way that should have been happening media-wide for decades, and Netflix can be applauded for how it has handled representation of BAME and LBGT people in each of its original series, but Orange Is The New Black stands with its head above the rest purely because of its endearing characters and storylines. I hope that the series to come will be equally genuine and entertaining, but if not I will hang on, no doubt along with many others, to the glorious four seasons we have received up to now.