'Orange Is The New Black' Is Becoming The Worst Show On Netflix

More like Orange Is The New Wack!

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It's not even a minute into the debut trailer for Season 3 of Orange Is The New Black when we see Daya, a federal inmate who is pregnant with a correctional officer's child, wearing earrings on a private stoop, where she and Gloria sit unattended. Gloria is pinching a cigarette, of course. This is Litchfield Correctional, where no guard would bother to stop her.

The second season of Orange Is The New Black was whimsical to an incredible fault. Where the show's debut season was blood and tears, Season 2 sought to undermine all the approximate realism and hardship accounting that initially made OITNB such an unrivaled dramedy. In Season 2, the prison guards clocked out, leaving rival demographic factions to bicker for control of the mess kitchen. Red annexes a greenhouse, which she and her menopausal goons used to sow marijuana and general discord. Caputo, Healy, and the guards are all scripted as more malicious, but that hardly matters given they're so frequently, implausibly absent. 

Last year, the Washington City Paper assigned a columnist to watch Season 2 with an ex-con, who offered scene-by-scene critique of the season, and of the show overall. (The first of these columns, which are more thoroughly entertaining than the season itself, is titled "Where the Fuck Are All the Guards?!") Susan K., the former inmate and reformed heroin addict, spends much of her review dismissing the vanity of the inmates: "Nobody, and I mean nobody, gave one good shit about shaving their legs, or armpits, or anything like that. I mean, what the hell for?​" All the salon appointments and contraband glamour that frame the inmates' interactions and covert collaborations are so preposterous that Susan and columnist Adam Dawson abandon their project in the middle of episode eight.

"I’ll tell you the most believable thing about this whole series is the idea that Piper only got 15 months for running dope money," Susan writes. "Because she’s white, rich, and blonde."

Season 2's plot and central conflict hinge on the incarceration of Vee, that insidious force of charisma who extracts nastiness from even the show's most upbeat characters. Crazy Eyes and Taystee, in particular, become so hostile and uncharacteristically vicious that, tragic arcs and revelations aside, they're unpleasant to watch. (Vee, as Litchfield's Sauron, turns Crazy Eyes into Gollum, a screeching, paranoid nuisance.) Whither the psychological effects of incarceration when this illustration is so exponentially dark and farcical that it sends an escape van plowing into a plush body dummy in its climatic hit-and-run. Politicking and smuggling that were once careful and tense are suddenly casual, if not flagrant. The prison sex scenes that once illustrated a literal starvation are now bouts of lust and fanservice a la Girls. No one goes wanting for much, or for long, in Litchfield Correctional.

Where OITNB's first season is anchored in the notes and anecdotes of Piper Kerman, the memoirist who lived this fictionalized life, Season 2 (and possibly 3) play as sprawling fan fantasy of what their stay in a women's correction facility would be like: sociable, sexy, bi-curious, and radical, of course. Not to be outdone by her own excesses, showrunner Jenji Kohan is now apparently doubling down on nonsense with more inmate control of the kitchen, more contraband, and more field trips. A women's correctional facility as girls' sleepaway camp, essentially. That's comedy, alright, and it's hardly thrilling.

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