TELEVISION: ’Orange Is the New Black’ changed how we streamed video.
“Orange Is the New Black,” finishing its seven-season run on Friday, was big. Big in its reach (presumably, though actual viewing figures for Netflix series are still an occult mystery). Big in its influence, as one of the first genuinely original programs in the new medium of streaming. Big in its ambitions to represent faces and situations that had been left off TV screens.
But also, it was simply big — teeming, packed to the ceiling with characters and story — in a way that becomes clear when you peek at Netflix’s spoiler list for its final season.
Oh, the things I cannot tell you about this show! Deaths and releases and imprisonments. Reappearances and disappearances. Love and change and illness and new circumstances and more death. A dozen and a half characters are named; far more are implied.
I’m not sure what to call the current creative era of TV — the one that began, roughly, with the twilight of cable classics like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” and with the dawn of streaming television. The Netflix era? The post-antihero era?
But whatever it is, “Orange Is the New Black” was the beginning of it.
When it arrived in summer 2013, it was not the first original series to air on Netflix. But it was really the first “Netflix series” in the sense we think of it now.
“Orange Is the New Black” was an original story. It had some of the markers of oldschool network TV but the specificity and scope of premium cable. It was nuanced and ambitious, but also broad and unpretentiously bawdy. It was dedicated to telling underrepresented stories.
It was something else, and it spent seven seasons establishing exactly what.
When Netflix first started making programming, it wasn’t clear what “Netflix shows” would look like, even to the people making them. “Arrested Development” Season 4 was a four-dimensional web of narrative, within which you might chase a plot thread from Episode 3 forward to Episode 8 and back to Episode 1. “House of Cards” simply approached streaming as premium cable by other means.
“Orange” was the first series to show us how streaming TV would really work and to teach us how to watch it.
The show looked like traditional TV, even more so than its fancier recent contemporaries in cable. It didn’t aim for the striking images of a “Breaking Bad,” the lapidary indie-film intimacy of “Enlightened” or the meticulous design curation of “Mad Men.”
Its aesthetic and composition were utilitarian, drab even, fitting its institutional setting. It achieved its effects more through conversation than through luminous visuals, much as early TV modeled itself on theater as opposed to cinema. It even had a TV schedule, of a sort; it came out once a year, always in June or July.
But in practice, in the way the viewer encountered it, it was like little that preceded it. Its distinguishing assets were size and time: The seasons and episodes could be vast, and you could watch them as fast as you wanted.
This was immersive, and it was suited to a story that began with a character being thrown into the deep end. Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), a Brooklyn artisanal soap maker convicted on a drug charge, has to suddenly acclimate herself to a sprawling society of women of far less privilege. The enormous catalog of characters and alliances, which was a barrier of entry with sweeping weekly series like “The Wire,” was easier to take in when you swallowed it whole, rather than in weekly bites.
But watching a show is only half the cultural experience of TV. The other half is the conversation around it, which changes when you no longer have people watching one show on one channel on one night. The audience would not be aggregated, they would have to find one another — something enabled by social media, which helpfully rose around the same time.
As one of the first streaming phenomena, “Orange” taught us about this, too. Its cultural reach wasn’t immediately apparent; we didn’t, and still don’t, have the kind of independent ratings figures for it that we do for network and cable series.
Then there was the matter of whose stories “Orange” told. The era of celebrated TV that preceded it had a preferred protagonist type: mostly white, mostly men, mostly like the sorts of people who ran TV networks. The next era would be open to a wider range of identity, color, sexual orientation and life experience. And “Orange” was instrumental in busting those gates open.
At first, it seemed like it would center on privileged, WASP-y Piper as the audience’s guide into a world of black and brown and lower-income women. But she turned out to be the series Trojan Drug Mule. She smuggled the viewer in; once inside, we found a series in which anyone, any episode, could be the lead.
“Orange,” though it had its share of male guards and significant others, was thoroughly and unapologetically woman-centric. It was polymorphous in gender and sexual identity. Its inmates were transgender, straight, bi, gay, “gay for the stay.”
More than diverse, it was complex. Its prison cliques tended to divide along racial lines, but within those groups were subdivisions, differences that came from generation, from background, from the simple fact that every person is an individual.
The episodes’ structure bolstered that philosophy, interweaving flashbacks into the present-day narrative. We learned how Tiffany Doggett (Taryn Manning), introduced as Piper’s belligerent, Bible-thumping antagonist, had her sense of self-worth destroyed in her childhood; how Dayanara Diaz (Dascha Polanco) evolved from a dreamy, artistic young girl into a hardened felon; how Gloria Mendoza (Selenis Leyva) landed in prison while escaping an abusive relationship.
The series was an illustration of the principle that, when it comes to representing people, quantity sometimes does equal quality. When you have an abundance of characters of different colors, ethnicities and class backgrounds, you can show that none of those groups are monoliths, because no one person has to represent an entire demographic.
In a way, the composition of “Orange” — a vast ensemble, composed of subgroups that break down into sub-subgroups — was a metaphor for Netflix, and the ways in which it was and wasn’t like mass-media TV of the past. Like the old broadcast networks, it aimed to make TV for everyone.
Its aesthetic and composition were utilitarian, drab even, fitting its institutional setting. It achieved its effects more through conversation than through luminous visuals, much as early TV modeled itself on theater as opposed to cinema.