As Netflix was staking out a place for itself as a content producer in 2013, it had several high profile original series, including the return season of cult comedy hit Arrested Development and the Kevin Spacey-led political thriller House of Cards. But it wasn’t either of these series which saw Netflix record its highest viewer numbers. Instead, it was a drama set inside a women’s prison, about a group of oddballs and misfits trying to survive prison life.
There are plenty of reasons to recommend Orange is the New Black; the writing shines with comedy, danger, warmth and almost unbearable tension, all in the space of a single episode, and the performances are as consistently strong as you’re likely to see in any television series. But much has been said about its celebration of diversity, which remains the major point setting it apart and seeing it win more substantially more attention than its contemporaries. Just last week, transgender woman Laverne Cox, who plays Sophia Burset, was on the cover Time magazine with an article that, even with its flaws, brought wide attention to the transgender movement.
The second season of the Netflix original series premiered over the weekend, and it remains a prime example of just how rich television that explores the relationships between diverse characters and social cliques can be.
It follows Piper Chapman, a privileged, intelligent but obtuse and self-involved Caucasian American woman who is sentenced to fifteen months in prison for a crime committed ten years ago. Inside the prison, she has to find her place amongst a group of women of all ages, races, shapes, sizes, social backgrounds and sexualities. It’s a microcosm where politics of all kinds are constantly at play.
Series creator Jenji Kohan understands that, with the premise, she has an entire ecosystem of women to work with and pressures that constantly threaten to push them to breaking point (and quite often do).
By contrast, Australia’s Wentworth – a reboot of Prisoner, also set inside a women’s prison, also premiering in 2013 — remains overwhelmingly white. There’s one Indigenous character, in spite of the fact that Indigenous people make up over a quarter of our prison population. Surely that’s a story worth telling?
Although television dramas in Australia and the US have begun to look more diverse, at the centre of almost every new drama is a character we’ve seen before. To even get Orange is the New Black up, the creator had to cast a more “relatable” character at its core.
Kohan told NPR in 2013 that Piper was her “Trojan horse”. She said: “You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful.”
It’s true, as Roxanne Gay noted in Salon, that the diverse characters are, to a certain extent, “planets orbiting Piper’s sun. The women of color don’t have the privilege of inhabiting their own solar systems.” But what Orange is the New Black does, even moreso in its second season, is delve so deeply into the lives of the “supporting cast” that to call them supporting cast members is a bit of a fallacy in itself.
It also doesn’t cast Piper as the heroine, even though it’s mainly through her perspective that we see prison life. We’re not expected to root for the pretty white girl and be simply intrigued by those surrounding her; it’s in the entire cast that the drama lies. It’s in the racial cliques, the sexual politics and the social interactions. Piper is as flawed as any character around her, and is often substantially less likeable than the others.
If Piper was the Trojan horse, this second series sees even more of those soldiers lurking inside spill out into the spotlight. As in the first series, each episode tells the backstory of one of the supporting characters via flashback. These aren’t just characters who happen to be of a certain ethnic or social background; it’s their background which informs their entire lives and their relationships while in prison.
We talk a lot about diversity within our culture, hoping that we can bring new voices to our screens, stages and galleries. The goal is to broaden the perspectives we’re exposed to and provide platforms for those with voices that we don’t get often to hear. But Orange is the New Black proves that, beyond those goals, the art itself is richer, more thrilling and captivating when it draws in those voices.
Audiences clearly want new stories and new perspectives, and they want them told in a forthright way. There are lessons to be learned from the success of Orange is the New Black. And hopefully at some point in the future there’ll be no need for a Trojan horse.