Orange Is The New Black: How It Revolutionised TV Binging Culture

All good things come to an end – even award-winning binge television from Netflix. As the countdown begins for Orange Is The New Black’s seventh and final season, we at Hot Press are, in particular, experiencing a flashback of nostalgia. We were quick to the party when the show debuted in – pauses to check calendar / feel so terribly old – 2013.

Goodness, those were different times. Back then, the idea of watching television on the internet still felt stonkingly novel. Netflix itself had arrived in Ireland a mere 12 months previously. “Binging” wasn’t yet a word people used in everyday conversation. Orange Is The New Black, from Weeds show-runner Jenji Kohan, represented a step into the unknown. The series was adapted from the memoir of a middle-class white American woman who went to prison when her days as a recreational drug smuggler came back to bite her. And it became an immediate sensation. If anything, it became more of a sensation as it outpaced the source material and set off on its own path.

It has continued that way ever since, with OITNB pushing boundaries in its portrayal of female characters and of minorities. In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, that feels more important than ever. When so much TV is about escaping reality, it requires us to confront the retrograde forces at play in the world.

That will continue in season seven, as main character Piper (Taylor Schilling) adjusts to life outside Litchfield Penitentiary. Season six concluded with her tying the knot with her on/off lover Alex (Laura Prepon). But now she’s outside and Alex is in. How will she cope?

Piper came to us as a bit of a trojan horse. Audiences are conditioned to identify with white middle-class characters. So they felt comfortable at her side as she embarked on her emotional journey through Litchfield. Soon though, OITNB was devoting as much screen time to characters such as Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren (Uzo Aduba), an African-American with mental health issues, and actress Kate Mulgrew – aka Captain Janeway, aka matriarchal Russian Galina “Red” Reznikov.

The series also showed how power dynamics work in all-female environments. “From my understanding of prisons, in men prisons the hierarchies are created through force,” Schilling told me once. “With women it’s a more verbal and relational - it’s about friendships and alliances and dealing with adversaries. I think we’ve captured that.”

She was proud, too, that Piper’s relationship with Alex wasn’t fetishised because it was same-sex. “The relationship isn’t even treated as a gay relationship,” she stated. “It’s just two people in love.”

“Diversity is one of the finest and most important points in the show – the prison set-up is the perfect context to see all these different people,” she elaborated. “It provides an opportunity for us to see that they are not their crime. It provides a window into all parts of them. In fact, I think it might be harder to see those parts if it didn’t take place in a prison. There’s not much you can hide after you’ve gone that far down the scale.”

Orange Is The New Black was out front in the fight for trans rights, too. With the show catapulting her towards the spotlight, Laverne Cox became the first trans person to feature on the cover of Time magazine in 2014. Later, she was the first trans person to be nominated for an Emmy.

“What is happening with trans people is that more and more of us are coming forward and saying this is who we are,” she told Hot Press. “I got a letter from a trans person who said, ‘I’ve been living in stealth for four years now’. I’m coming out now – because of you. That is a lovely thing – being able to be in full ownership of who you are.”

“All the characters are written with such humanity,” she continued. “My job is to step into those boots and deliver the truth of who that woman is, a woman who has touched so many people and opened so many minds. You can really achieve an awful lot on television, when the story is as multi-dimensional and complicated as Orange.”

Piper herself was soon shown to contain multitudes. Far from the goody-two-shoes she was initially introduced as, with time she was revealed to be a character of hidden, not always pleasant, depths. As it should be. Male characters are allowed be nuanced and unlikeable. Why shouldn’t their female counterparts be portrayed in similarly complex fashion?

“I get this question all the time. ‘How do you feel about people not liking Piper?’ “ Schilling told me in 2016. “It blows my mind. For there to be a girl on television we might not like is a big deal. Even fans are going ‘We don’t like you’. It’s fascinating – and it’s wonderful that I am part of the conversation.”

Despite finally tasting freedom, Piper’s woes merely multiply this year. “She’s beginning to navigate what it’s like to live in the civilian world again, and learning that freedom doesn’t come immediately when she steps outside of prison,” Schilling told Entertainment Weekly. “She becomes a little bit bolder expressing what she wants rather than trying to fit in and make it about other people.”

“It was one of the more surreal moments in my life to end that show,” is how she characterised the conclusion of OINTB in another interview. “In every way it changed my life. Top down, bottom up.”

• Orange Is The New Black season seven premieres on Netflix on Friday, July 26