Jenji Kohan’s prison series starts as a comedy about a well-off blonde behind bars and quickly becomes an ensemble piece about the women around her. The first two seasons are strong; the five after are patchier and longer than they need to be.
Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) has a soap business in Brooklyn, a fiancé and a fifteen-month sentence for once carrying a suitcase of drug money for a girlfriend. She surrenders to Litchfield, a minimum-security federal prison in upstate New York, meaning to keep her head down. Within a day she has insulted the cook, been starved for it and found the girlfriend, Alex Vause (Laura Prepon), in the same building. Jenji Kohan’s series, adapted from Piper Kerman’s memoir about her own year inside, ran for seven seasons of thirteen episodes, the first arriving on 11 July 2013 and the last on 26 July 2019. It is good, and best in its first two years, when it was still finding out what it had.
What it had was everyone else. The plan is plain by the third or fourth hour: each episode picks one inmate and cuts from the present to show how she got here. Jennifer Hatton, the editor, makes those cuts on a look or a half-finished line, so the past arrives as an answer to a question the present has just asked. Galina “Red” Reznikov (Kate Mulgrew) runs the kitchen like a small country, and we learn why, and it is not what we guessed. Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson (Danielle Brooks) is the loudest voice in the yard and her episode explains the noise. By the time the series turns to the guards, we have stopped assuming anybody is only what they look like.
Manuel Billeter, Vanja Černjul and Andrew Voegeli share the photography across the run and keep to one rule: the prison is lit from above, flat and greenish, and nobody looks well in it. The flashbacks are warmer and shot closer, so you know where you are before anyone speaks. Michael Shaw’s production design gives the dorm plywood cubicles and open bunks, a kitchen of steel counters, a chapel with folding chairs and a guards’ station behind scratched glass. It is a cheap, worn, believable place, and ninety-one episodes later the sets have still not started to look like sets.
Schilling has the hardest job and the least thanks. Piper is meant to be a little spoiled and slow to notice her advantages, and the writing keeps changing its mind about how much to like her. Prepon plays Alex low and amused and is better every time the two share a scene. Natasha Lyonne’s Nicky Nichols gets the best lines and throws them away. Michelle Hurst, as Piper’s bunkmate Miss Claudette Pelage, does a great deal by not speaking. And Uzo Aduba’s Suzanne Warren, nicknamed “Crazy Eyes” and fixed on Piper from the first week, made us laugh and then made us ashamed of laughing. Aduba plays her with her whole face lit by hope, and when Piper turns her away the light goes out slowly enough that you watch it go.
The scenes we would keep above all others are in the library, where Taystee and Poussey Washington (Samira Wiley) argue about books, trade contraband and do a two-hander impression of white women that we have not stopped quoting. Brooks and Wiley play a friendship nobody wrote a plot for, and it is the truest thing in the series. It moved us more than anything the show did on purpose.
Then there is the sprawl. Seven seasons is a long time in one building, and by the fourth the series is manufacturing crises to keep everyone indoors. Storylines for the staff, with Joe Caputo (Nick Sandow) chief among them, take up more room than they earn. The tone has always swung between sitcom and something much harder; early on the swing was the point, but later it becomes a habit, and a violent scene will be followed by a joke that has not noticed. Kohan’s previous series, Weeds, had the same trouble, and this is the better show. The list of directors runs from Jodie Foster and Nicole Holofcener to Matthew Weiner, and eventually to Prepon, Lyonne and Sandow themselves.
Watch the first two seasons and see who you miss when the episode ends. If you are still there in the fourth, you are staying to the end, and the end is earned. It is an 18 certificate, and not only for the language.
