Season Three of Orange Is the New Black dropped early this evening, which means the laid of Litchfield are back in our lives to once again make us feel every emotion there is to feel. When the Jenji Kohan-created prison-set series debuted in 2013, it was full of surprises, particularly in the form of its secondary and tertiary characters, who made the series more vibrant and layered than its straightforward premise initially suggested. This wasn’t the story of Piper Chapman, a middle-class white girl who gets her world rocked by prison—this was the stories, plural, of many different women, tearing down the idea of a one-size-fits-all prison narrative.
Over the course of the second season, however, Orange Is the New Black started to slip into ridiculousness. Suddenly, it was very easy to remember that the show comes from the same creator as Weeds, which got too big for its little boxes, devolving into a story full of implausibilities better suited for fairytales. Season Two continued to tackle the seriousness of rape, abuse, and power dynamics in prison, but all of the show’s realer moments were undercut by its more fantastical ones, like the increasingly stupid love story between Daya and Bennett and those fan service-y behind-bars sexcapades. The show remained fun to watch, but should a series about inmates’ experiences really be this fun?
Looking ahead at what few glimpses we’ve had of the third season, it appears we’re heading for more of the same nonsensical whimsy. Case and point: our own Expert on All Things Trash™ Justin Charity wrote that Litchfield is starting to look more like a sleepaway camp than a women’s correctional facility.
So we might as well lean into it, and there’s no better way to celebrate (or forget?) the show’s sillier aspects than to get silly yourself. So without further ado, we present Get LITchfield: The Unofficial Orange Is the New Black Drinking Game—14 rules for the 14-episode third season (with a few bonus rules, because #shots). Play with a 40 in your hand at all times if you’re feeling like Piper on her furlough.
1.
