Orange Is the New Black

Orange Is the New Black, critically acclaimed American television comedy-drama series that was originally broadcast on the Netflix streaming service from 2013 to 2019. The series, created by the American television producer and writer Jenji Kohan, is based on Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison (2010), a memoir by the American criminal justice reform activist Piper Kerman. The title is a reference to a color of prison jumpsuit that became popular in the U.S. in the 1970s and a play on the fashion phrase, “…is the new black.” The series tells the stories of women incarcerated in a fictional minimum-security federal prison and addresses issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, economic inequality, and mass incarceration.

Kerman’s book tells the story of her arrest, trial, and conviction for money laundering and her experiences during her incarceration at Federal Correctional Institution Danbury in Connecticut (known as FCI Danbury), a minimum-security prison, which was then a women’s facility. Kerman was confined at FCI Danbury for 13 months starting in 2004.

Characters and themes

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Orange Is the New Black, the series, uses Kerman’s experiences as a jumping-off point to give voice to women of many races, religions, and sexualities who find themselves caught in the prison system. Many form chosen families of fellow incarcerated women. Nearly all face discrimination from each other and prison staff based on homophobia, racism, misogyny, and transphobia. The series begins with a focus on Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), an affluent bisexual white woman who has a comfortable life with her fiancé Larry (Jason Biggs) in Brooklyn, New York. After she is convicted of money laundering and arrives at the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary in upstate New York to serve her sentence, she must learn how to live in an environment with an extreme power imbalance between prison staff and incarcerated women.

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At Litchfield Piper meets many women who are also working hard to survive their time behind bars. Among the dozens of incarcerated characters in Orange are Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson (Danielle Brooks), who grew up in foster care and finds comfort in her best friend in prison, Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley). Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren (Uzo Aduba) wrestles with her mental health. Nicky Nichols (Natasha Lyonne) struggles with heroin addiction. Galina “Red” Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew), who has ties to the Russian mafia, runs the prison kitchen—as well as a smuggling operation—and serves as a mother figure to some of the women. Dayanara Diaz (Dascha Polanco) falls into a relationship with correctional officer John Bennett (Matt McGorry) and becomes pregnant. Gloria Mendoza (Selenis Leyva), who vies with Red for control of the kitchen, is desperate to leave prison and rejoin her children. Maria Ruiz (Jessica Pimentel), who is pregnant when she enters Litchfield, gives birth and suffers from postpartum depression when she is separated from her baby. Sophia Burset (Laverne Cox), a trans woman who works as the prison hair stylist, is denied hormone replacement therapy and endures transphobic harassment.

Awards

Orange earned 21 Emmy Award nominations, winning four Emmy Awards through its seven seasons. The show’s cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award in 2016 and 2017 for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a comedy series. Orange also earned a 2014 GLAAD Media Award for outstanding comedy series and a 2015 NAACP Image Award for outstanding writing in a comedy series. The American Film Institute included the series in its list of top television programs of the year in 2013 and 2014. Orange also received a Peabody Award in 2013 “for exposing a prison system shrouded in mystery and making it a place of possibility and connection.” The series, Peabody jurors wrote, is a “complex, funny and perceptive exploration of race, class, power and the persistence of a ragged kind of hope.”