Like plenty of other avid watchers, I had heard a bit about the series before it came out, and saw some of the TV spots and YouTube trailers for Orange is the New Black upon its release, and thought, oh, so Jason Biggs and Donna from That 70s Show are heading up this new Netflix series about prison? Cool, but I think I’ll pass. Then I heard that Jenji Kohan was behind it, and I liked Weeds until I got bored with it, so I took slightly more notice. And then the reviews and articles came pouring in, the vast majority of which were overwhelmingly positive.
I realized it’s a hard show to promote. Really, it’s a good thing the response to it, the word of mouth promotion in particular, has been so consistently enthusiastic because it doesn’t have a really catchy or sexy hook despite the quantity of lesbian relations it features. Its star quality is relatively modest, and its prison setting, at least to me, sounded a bit tired.
An upper middle class woman getting busted for drugs sounded too much like Weeds. But that changed once I was probably about three episodes in. The first episode, to be sure, is incredibly strong, and grabbed me from the very real and deeply emotional yet beautifully underplayed scene between Jason Biggs and Taylor Schilling, who plays our protagonist Piper. The world only expands from there, and the breadth of characters combined with the depth of their individual and collective stories is remarkable, albeit tough to capture in a 30-second spot. So if you’re hesitating, as I did, based on the lacklustre promotional material, know that there’s so much more to Orange that you will find it hard not to fall in love with.
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