Orange Is the New Black Review

Kohan said openly that Piper Chapman was a way in, a blonde graduate the network could sell, and that the real show was the sixty women around her. That is exactly what happened, and it is why the series improved as it demoted its own lead. The flashback structure, giving nearly every inmate an episode explaining how she arrived, turns a comedy into a systemic argument without ever delivering a lecture. Uzo Aduba, Danielle Brooks, Samira Wiley and Kate Mulgrew are all extraordinary, and the writing trusts them with comedy and horror in the same scene.

The tonal range is also the flaw, because a farce about contraband can sit two minutes from a suicide and not every juxtaposition works. The fifth season, a riot stretched across three days and thirteen episodes, is a genuine misjudgement that stalls everything. The photography is flat institutional television throughout. But the final season, about immigration detention, is as furious and as clear eyed as anything the platform has produced.