‘Orange’ resets show back to beginning for Season 6
‘Stranger Things’ teases Season 3
It was hard to know how “Orange is the New Black” would — or could — come back after its fifth season, which was as ambitious as it was ultimately disastrous. The show became as scattered and chaotic as the inmate protestturned-riot it was trying to depict, sending every character spinning seemingly for the sake of it. By season’s end, two guards had died and the inmates were rounded up and shipped off to different prisons.
It’s understandable why, after four similarly structured seasons, the show was tempted to slow the story down to follow just a few extraordinary days in the characters’ lives. But in the end, the result was too thrilled with its own daring to make much sense. So the question was how Season 6 could recover without ditching its ongoing storylines and starting over with a whole new cast (which would be easy, given the constant revolving door of inmates).
Thankfully, Season 6 does its damndest to reset the show back to some of the dynamics that have worked best for it from the beginning. The first few episodes narrow the show’s focus to the smaller group of inmates going to the maximum security prison (or “max”) just up the street, including heavyweight characters like Taystee (Danielle Brooks), Piper (Taylor Schilling), Gloria (Selenis Leyva), Suzanne (Uzo Aduba), Nicky (Natasha Lyonne), and Red (Kate Mulgrew). Max has loomed over “Orange” as an omnipresent threat, and getting to see it in action ends up restoring a kind of order the show desperately needed.
The “riot girls” are largely split up into rival sections of the prison and have to adjust to being relegated back to the bottom of the food chain. Some end up in “C block,” where they have to find their place in an ecosystem built up over decades by Carol (Henny Russell), a lifer who quickly figured out how to make herself a kingpin. Complicating matters is the fact that her sister Barbara (a surprise Mackenzie Phillips) runs things over in “D block,” and the two of them often use the younger inmates surrounding them as pawns in their ongoing war of extreme pettiness.
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The sisters are fun — especially when played by Ashley Jordyn and Lauren Kelston in their ’70s era flashbacks — but the season spends too much time with their deputies, who never quite prove as charismatic as any of the original characters. Short-tempered Madison “Badison” Murphy (Amanda Fuller) stalks around C block with a thick Boston accent and not much else, while “Daddy” (Vicci Martinez) flirts with a dead-eyed Daya (Dascha Polanco) in a plot that has trouble ever getting off the ground.
Another aspect of this season that never quite gels is its treatment of those who work for the prison, whose vacillating sympathies and/or disgust for the inmates have always made them some of the more frustrating characters on the show. That holds more true than ever after the riot, with some doubling down on their hatred and others more torn about their jobs than ever. The best of these include McCullough (Emily Tarver), suffering PTSD after the riot, and a conflicted max guard whose unexpected ties to Taystee’s past make for the season’s best flashback sequence by a mile. On the flip side, Matt Peters’ Luschek inexplicably gets way more time to do exactly what he’s always done, while the overarching threat of corporate injustice from a furious Linda (Beth Dover) runs in repetitive circles right until the very end.
If this sounds like the season devotes an awful lot of time trying to make sure everyone gets as much screentime as possible, well, you’re not wrong. With a finale running over 80 minutes long(!), there’s no shortage of story. But there’s one plotline in particular that illustrates a particularly exasperating storytelling choice on the show’s part. After trying so desperately last season to hold people accountable after a guard killed Poussey (Samira Wiley), Taystee ends up on trial for a crime she didn’t commit.
Arizona State University is awarding its 2018 Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism to CNN anchor Anderson Cooper.
He will receive the award on Oct 17 in Phoenix from the university’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Cooper says he’s honored and humbled to receive the award because Cronkite “sparked my interest in journalism at a young age.”
Cooper has been with CNN since 2001. He also has been a regular contributor to “60 Minutes” on CBS since 2006.
The 34 previous Cronkite Award winners include Bob Woodward, Tom Brokaw, Al Michaels, Scott Pelley, Diane Sawyer, Judy Woodruff and Helen Thomas.
ASU’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication was named in Cronkite’s honor in 1984.
The famed CBS News anchor died in 2009.
Netflix has delivered a treat for “Stranger Things” fans, releasing a teaser video that appears to set up some developments in Hawkins, Ind, for Season 3 of the sci-fi drama series.
The 90-second video heralds the arrival of the Starcourt Mall — “one of the finest shopping facilities in America and beyond” — in the fictional Indiana hamlet. The promo video is full of 1980s mall-culture references, from the vintage logo for retailer to Gap to a shoutout to the now-departed bookstore chain Waldenbooks and music retailer Sam Goody. The teaser depicts the character of Steve Harrington, played by Joe Keery, as working in the Scoops Ahoy ice cream shop in the mall’s “state of the art food court.”
The presence of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” album in the Sam Goody’s window and the Tom Clancy novel “The Hunt for Red October” in the Waldenbooks window pegs the time frame of Season 3 as 1984. The promo video hails Hawkins as “a growing patriotic community and a shining example of the American Dream,” which seems a nod to the current political climate.
The reference to mall developer Starcourt Industries suggests a new corporate menace could be coming to the town that has already been rocked by the activity at the mysterious Hawkins National Laboratory. (Agencies)