'Orange is the New Black' cancellation marks end of era
IT’S THE end of an era.
Netflix released a video on Wednesday featuring the cast of “Orange is the New Black” announcing that the show will end with its seventh season, which will be released on the streaming service in 2019.
Shows are always ending to varying amounts of fanfare, but “OITNB” is no ordinary show. In the video, cast member Kate Mulgrew, who plays Galina “Red” Reznikov, said, “I’m going to miss playing and living on the edge of one of the most groundbreaking, original and controversial series of this decade.”
She’s certainly right about one thing: The show was groundbreaking.
Netflix’s 2013 release of “OITNB,” along with “House of Cards” and “Hemlock Grove,” forever altered how television is made and shattered viewers’ expectations of how to watch. This was the full first slate of original programming aimed at adults that Netflix ever produced. (The company also released a new season of “Arrested Development” in 2013. Though it was made in-house, it was also based on a pre-existing Fox property.)
It is shocking, now, to think that a year’s worth of original programming for the streaming service consisted of just a handful of shows. By the end of this year, Netflix will have produced and released 700 original shows and movies. It has a subscriber base of more than 137 million people around the globe, and in 2018 it’s poured about US$8 billion into creating original content in an attempt to reach its goal of having half it offerings be made in-house.
The strategy is working. At the recent Emmy Awards, Netflix broke new ground by gaining the same number of statutes as the awards-garnering powerhouse HBO.
But it wasn’t always like this. Netflix began as a DVD rental service that delivered entertainment via the US Postal Service. When it shifted to streaming, it was showing old movies and television shows from various other studios.
Then, in February 2013, Netflix did something shocking. It spent US$100 million to create its own television show, which starred then-powerhouse actor Kevin Spacey alongside Robin Wright. The network only had 27 million subscribers at the time. It received generally positive reviews from critics and was nominated for nine Primetime Emmys in its first season. (Though it was hard to track viewer figures, as Netflix famously does not release them.)
“Its success might alter the concept of traditional television programming,” The Washington Post’s Emily Yahr wrote just before the show’s release, adding, “Instead of doling out one episode per week, broadcast and cable television-style, all 13 episodes of the show’s first season will be available on the day it premieres.”
It’s difficult to remember, but in 2013, the concept of dumping a whole season for fans to bingewatch was absolutely unheard of. But, unlike today, there wasn’t another Netflix show to start on when it was finished. At least, not until that summer.
Netflix released its first foray into horror with the Eli Roth produced “Hemlock Grove” in April 2013. Though reactions to the show, which ended in 2015, were fairly muted, it did earn two Emmy nominations.
Then, in July, Netflix released “OITNB.” “House of Cards” may have been shocking for its release method, but “OITNB” looked like nothing else on television.
“OITNB” was a pioneer in television’s push to create more diversity onscreen. The show, based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, is about a preppy white woman who, through a set of circumstances involving an ex-girlfriend, finds herself in prison. The cast is almost entirely female, with more racial diversity than almost any other piece of mainstream entertainment.
Furthermore, as Laura Beck wrote for Jezebel, “It’s not diversity in the way we usually see it - the black best friend who’s basically just a nice cipher with dark skin, or the weird diversity of the old war movies where there was a black guy and everything he said related to his being black ... Plus, I just love that everyone is different looking — it’s great to see a wide spectrum of shapes, sizes, ages, and colours represented on screen.”
As time marched on, everything that made these shows so monumental slowly normalized. Now, to many, it feels odd to watch a show where the episodes come out once a week. Diversity is almost a mandate. And Netflix makes so much original content that HBO is sometimes referred to as the underdog.
“OITNB” will likely go out with a whimper, not a bang, much like “Hemlock Grove” did and “House of Cards” will. That’s not because it’s bad, but simply because it’s been in our consciousness so long that we don’t think about it, the way fish don’t feel water.
It no longer feels revolutionary. But without it, we wouldn’t have modern television.