Orange Is the New Black: Season 7

There've been lots of pieces already about the end of Orange is the New Black representing the end of an era - kind of specifically, the "early streaming" era. (Do you know what now stands as Netflix's oldest ongoing show? It's BoJack Horseman. Weird, right?) They've focused largely on things like how it's fun and even cute to look back at how people reacted to the early seasons of this thing, when binge-watching was a novel concept and some viewers were more comfortable consuming show one episode at a time over the course of several weeks, or how only on streaming was it possible to get this bold and experimental and sprawling with your storytelling. (I don't buy that part; I don't think the show would have been substantially different on Showtime or HBO.)

I want to offer a different take on the cultural relevance Orange is the New Black and I'll come right out and say that I think it's going to end up being one of the defining shows of the 2010s by comparing what this thing was when it started in 2013 and what it became by 2019.

When this thing started it was the story of an upper middle class white woman being sent to minimum security prison for drug trafficking. The inmates of color around her weren't presented initially as sympathetic people; they were presented as scary and potentially threatening to Piper Chapman, with one eventually beloved gay black character earning the unfortunate (and tough for certain segments of the fanbase to shed) nickname "Crazy Eyes" because of her totally friendly and benign tendency to stare excitedly at Piper. Think about where most of the drama stemmed form in Season 1. There was Piper's (white) ex-girlfriend Alex, there was Piper's big (white) rival Pennsatucky and there was Piper's (white, male) counselor explicitly forbidding Piper from engaging in any acts of homosexuality with Alex. We got some stories in the margins about Laverne Cox and her character's transition and the issues that was causing her both at home and in prison, and we got some faint whiffs of stories about racial injustice in the prison system and how white women and black women are sentenced differently for the same crimes, but this was first and foremost Piper's story about how hard it is to be a bisexual white woman in minimum security prison.

Fast forward seven years, and all of the show's most sympathetic characters are black women and undocumented immigrants set to be deported. Somewhere along the way the show stopped being about Piper's life, and she got pushed to the margins and all those characters on the margins had their stories start contributing to bigger picture themes like the rampant injustice inherent in for-profit prison systems and the deportation process. Racism in the early seasons was treated largely as a joke, like when the trashy white meth heads would spew hilarious 2013 stereotypes; by 2019 the show was done treating racism of any sort as a laughing matter.

The show was often messy, but it used its platform and popularity to tackle key issues of the decade from trans rights to Black Lives Matter to the ongoing family separation crisis. It is not hard to envision a strawman viewer whose views on these subjects were made more empathetic and humane in no small part because their favorite characters on a television show were suffering. Call me cynical, but when the deportation of an entirely fictional character can stir more outrage in someone than the weekly reports about people dying in ICE facilities, I mean, that's the power of television and storytelling, I guess, and kudos to Orange Is the New Black for using said power for good.

Also, kudos for bringing back so many old castmembers here in the final season. It might be fanservice, but it was done in the purest way. Just, "hey, let's check in on what this guy's been up to with one quick scene," and not, "it's time to bring this person back from the dead so she can beef with this other character because the actresses used to be on the same show and it'd be a fun wink" or whatever.

Oh, I had a Wire comparison I wanted to make but I couldn't find a place to shoehorn it in. Basically it was just that this show at its best was capable of portraying systemic injustice at every level of an institution like no show I've seen since The Wire. But also, this was all way too messy with far too many go-nowhere stories to really compare to the tightly plotted Shakespearean tragedy that was The Wire. Still a pretty good show, though!