TELEVISION
“Orange Is the New Black” has reached the end of its sentence.
The final season of Jenji Kohan’s groundbreaking show about inmates in a women’s penitentiary arrived on Netflix on Friday. In 2013, the show introduced us to Piper (Taylor Schilling), a New Yorker with an artisanal soap company. Piper went to prison after pleading guilty to an old charge of carrying drug money, and we were introduced to a sprawling population of women incarcerated alongside her.
The show has crammed a vast plot and many characters into what amounts to only about 18 months of fictional time, including multiple prison gang power grabs, deaths, rapes, births, escapes, a riot and a big move from minimum to maximum security.
Although Piper left prison in the Season 6 finale, after finishing her sentence, her new wife, Alex (Laura Prepon), is still incarcerated, and Season 7 opens to find Taystee (Danielle Brooks) coming to terms with a life sentence after being convicted of murdering a guard.
What does successfully wrapping up this sprawling show look like for its creator?
“Impact and connection, more than anything,” Kohan said in a phone interview this month. “Even if people are nothing like these characters, if they can recognize the emotional truth of their human experience, then it’s been a success.”
Kohan reflected on why she finds dramedy more realistic than straight drama, how she feels about ending the series and how diversity became part of the show’s legacy. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
Q: How does it feel to be coming to the end of seven seasons of the show?
A: It’s a mixed bag. I’m ready to be out of prison. It takes up a lot of psychological space, and it can be oppressive and difficult and depressing. But it was a privilege to do this show. The people that came together to build it and inhabit it were remarkable, and the fact that we got to normalize diversity — it’s really hard to give that up. But seven years is a good run, and it was time.
Q: Do you see the show as a form of protest?
A: It’s a call to awareness, a call to empathy and a call to feel injustice and want to do something about it. At the same time, I feel like my first job is to entertain, and hopefully people just have a good experience in watching it.
Q: In this new season, there are storylines around ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention centers and the #Metoo movement, as well as prison. How do you balance these topics with making the show entertaining and funny?
A: I think that it’s organic. I’m a strong believer in humor for survival. I don’t believe a drama that is 100% dramatic, because that’s not how we live and function as human beings. So I find it very natural to slam comedy up against tragedy, because it mirrors life.
Q: One of the ways “Orange” was ahead of its time is the diversity of the cast, right from Season 1.
A: It’s so important because I think for so long (television) hasn’t been a natural representation of the population, and it should be. But before all of the diversity and the inclusion or whatever, our baseline is talent. You can be a black lesbian in a wheelchair, and that’s great. You tick a lot of boxes. But if you can’t act, I’m sorry, you’re not getting the part. And because (people of color and other marginalized groups) had been neglected, there was so much talent. It was like, oh my God, people have been idiots for not tapping that.