Before we begin, be warned, this is an appreciation article for Orange Is the New Black. If you’re not a fan, we’re sure you’ll be one before this article ends. And if you are, well, we advise you to keep your tissue box close to you because the nostalgia is going to make you cry buckets.
Best Development in a Series
The story of Orange Is the New Black began with a pathetic and privileged white woman, learning that the world is not just high-class societies and soirees. She is thrust into a world of strife, and crime. Learning to adapt and overcome is the way of the prison, and the show mostly features her struggle to learn this. Cold showers, miserable food, and bullies are the norm here, and Piper is slowly learning the way.
She even manages to last a month successfully. However, the biggest shock of the show isn’t to Piper; it is to us. The show which began as a re-telling of a white woman’s miserable unfortunate life becomes a story of various women. Women of colour, women of different races and cultures. They are all going through strife but at varying degrees. We learn of the discrimination wrought upon the people who aren’t white, purely because they aren’t so.
OITNB Does It All
They are all women of circumstance, living in a world that doesn’t care for them. The story is of an ensemble of ten characters, a mother-daughter pair, a black prisoner turned prison lecturer and one of the disappeared.
Orange Is the New Black does an excellent job in answering questions. While it does leave a few questions for the viewers to ponder upon, others it features through an entire season. There are questions like, what happened to Maritza. She gets deported, but we don’t know any further than that. The stories are all either sad or bittersweet, and without the kind of storytelling OITNB had, we wouldn’t have seen the rise of Netflix or other streaming networks to give us more meaningful content.