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| Orange is the New Black |
Spoiler alert: if the following questions intrigue you, you are caught up on Netflix's Orange is the New Black and you're probably as excited as I am that season two has finally arrived.
Did Piper kill Pennsatucky? If Piper really did kill Pennsatucky, will the time added to her sentence mean we'll soon be looking forward to a season three?
Reality alert: the United States female prison population has increased 800% in the last three decades. For now, prison may be our best available option to deal with these kinds of criminals. The Women's Prison Association is a New York-based advocacy group that recently developed an incarceration alternative called "Justice Home", which is designed to help female offenders address the underlying issues that led them to commit their crimes, instead of simply packing them off to prison. In New York alone, one-third of women released each year are back in prison within three years.
Just take the case of Bridgette Gibbs, a veteran of the US criminal justice system whose story would work neatly as background for many of the characters in Orange is the New Black.
Desperate to get her children back, Gibbs managed to kick her habit. "I like this life better," she told me. Real prisons weren't designed to accommodate white, upper middle-class ladies with college degrees like Kerman. A new report out last week found that 59% of the US prison population is black or hispanic, despite those ethnic groups making up 29% of the population. And while Kerman's very middle class-ness may have made her prison experience that much more challenging, it provided her with a support system that made her post-prison life a whole lot easier.
Hoisting an entire 13-episode season of a compulsively watchable twist of comedy and drama is something of a sentence, and the cast of "Orange is the New Black" are the perfect crowd with which to be locked away.
Piper Chapman (played by Taylor Schilling)
Shining moment: Look no further than episode one: "Thirsty Bird." For those who did not have time to re-watch season one before the weekend, Taylor Schilling communicates Chapman's entire experience in prison in a single ugly cry that makes for one of her finest moments on screen.
Runner-up: Chapman gets a breakthrough with her ex-fiancee Larry (Jason Biggs) in episode 9, the rollicking "40 OZ. of Furlough," when she gets the white whale of prison privileges.
Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson (Danielle Brooks)
Shining moment: Episode two, "Looks Blue, Tastes Red," emerges as the key chapter on Taystee. Runner-up: It is difficult not to steer viewers toward "A Whole Other Hole," in which Taystee and the other African American inmates (Litchfield inmates group themselves by race) inspire a prison-wide "Vagina Monologues."
Daya Diaz (Dascha Polanco)
Shining moment: Daya does not get the screen time she got in season one, but the narrative seeds of her sweet relationship with CO Bennett (Matt McGorry) and her effort to frame wild, outrageous CO Mendez (Pablo Schreiber) last season are sown to explosive, surprising effects in episode 10, "Little Mustachioed S***."
Lorna Morello (Yael Stone)
Shining moment: In almost every episode of "Orange is the New Black," the backstory of one of Litchfield's inmates is explored. Almost without exception, the stories posit the characters as victims of circumstance, but without giving too much away, the story of Morello is not just a move in another direction, but it makes episode four, "A Whole Other Hole," one of the best episodes in the whole life of the show.
Runner-up: "A Whole Other Hole" seems to unpack revelations that should need their own season's worth of action to resolve, but in episode 10, "Little Mustachioed S***," the phenomenon of Morello levels up economically and movingly.
Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren (Uzo Aduba)
Of course, these are not the only reasons to watch "Orange is the New Black" season two. Orange is the New Black has always been a bit of a head fake.
Creator Jenji Kohan has admitted she uses the story of WASPy prison inmate Piper Chapman to draw TV audiences into stories about the types of women who rarely take centerstage in more mainstream fare: a transgender woman, an older Russian woman, poor and undereducated black and Hispanic women and the mentally ill.
That process continues to wonderful effect in the show's second season, as we learn more about the history behind a wonderful collection of characters stuffed into a federal women's prison. In particular, character actress extraordinaire Lorraine Toussaint cuts a blazing swath through this year's batch of episodes, as an O.G. who lands in the prison and has serious history with Danielle Brooks' longtime inmate Tasha "Taystee" Jefferson.
On one level, Orange is a tragicomedy about society's fallen, from the poor and mentally disturbed folks filling up the prison to the working class schlubs who have to guard and care for them. As Vee returns to the prison, she has dreams of uniting the black inmates into a gang who will control everything, threatening the odd sense of harmony in this fictional prison.
Tough as prison life is depicted here, Orange does avoid the harshest tones. The show's abusive guard, George Mendez (played by Pablo Schreiber with a gloriously bad porn star-style moustache), was put on leave last season; there seems to be little threat of rape or harsh violence among the inmates in the second season's early episodes.
