Blair Brown loves jailtime stint
Veteran actress says joining Orange Is the New Black was an easy career call
Litchfield Penitentiary is crowded. Very crowded.
That’s one of the themes in Season 4of Orange Is the New Black, arriving Friday on Netflix. Luckily for us, the crowding includes the arrival of celebrity chef Judy King, whom the inmates had raptly watched being arraigned and convicted on tax-evasion charges last season.
The women of Litchfield were initially disappointed that King (who has been compared to Martha Stewart) was assigned to a different prison. But in the last episode of Season 3, she arrived at Litchfield to surrender herself, in the person of Blair Brown, who becomes a regular in the new season.
In an even more pivotal development in the season finale, as the prisoners slipped through a gap in the fence and frolicked in the lake that had been just out of reach, the consequences of privatizing the prison became clear.
Dozens and dozens of new inmates arrived to take up residence, dou- bling the prison’s capacity and increasing the possibility of conflict exponentially.
With the overcrowding, “you do push all the different groups together, and (some of ) the alliances that happen are unexpected,” Brown said during a Q&A session with TV critics this winter in Los Angeles. “The animosity: that’s expected and unexpected.”
Brown has been a busy working actor for more than 40 years, playing Jackie Kennedy in the 1983 miniseries Kennedy and starring in The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd in 1987. Beginning in 2008, she played Nina on Fringe and last season she appeared in Limitless.
Joining Orange Is the New Black, though, was an easy call, she said when asked what she expected the role to do for her career.
“It was actually less about what it’s done for me careerwise, (and more about) what it did to my spirit, my heart and soul,” she said.
“So often the climate that you’re working in isn’t as free, as exciting” as it might be.
Not to bash Limitless, cancelled by CBS after one season, “but it is a boy job . . . All I do is kind of nod and get people food.”
Brown says she loved her time on Fringe, “but that was originally a story about a female protagonist and a woman who was spooky and ran a giant corporation, and it turned into a story about a father and son. That was kind of way off.”
Often “in this business, that’s what tends to happen,” Brown said. “On those boy shows, it’s not that there’s anything against women. They just don’t know how to write women.”
By contrast, “On this job, everybody works really hard. There are lots of laughs. Everybody keeps raising the game of everyone else. There’s incredible generosity.”
Although Orange Is the New Black is primarily about the relationships among the women, each season has a general theme, including Season 3’s religious enlightenings.
“The theme thing was hard this year,” creator Jenji Kohan said. “We start with political agendas, the corporatization of the prison, stratification of people into their little mosaic pieces within the prison.”
Plus, she added, “All the fun stuff, like race and hate and some things from current events that we want to filter through our lens.”
Kohan, who previously created Showtime’s female-centric Weeds, got her start in TV writing for sitcoms including Friends and Mad About You. (Her brother, David Kohan, is co-creator of Will & Grace.)
Along with stories taking place in the prison, Orange Is the New Black regularly flashes back to show how its characters got there.
“I like things to be episodic and serialized at the same time, if it’s at all possible,” Kohan said.
In contrast to her previous shows, full seasons of Orange Is the New Black are often watched in one or a few binges. And with every episode readily available, “We don’t have to necessarily remind people of things,” she said. “In the beginning, I really missed ‘Previously on . . .’ We don’t do that anymore, but it was a shortcut to get information out in a lot of ways.”
Really, Kohan said, “You should be watching the thing as a whole, but I’ve been doing this a long time and I’m used to just making individual episodes. So I didn’t change my habits.”