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Positive:
133
Mixed:
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Negative:
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Critic Reviews
Jun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Wwhether they say so or not, everyone seems aware that prison sieges don’t end well. That knowledge invests the season with purpose. More than ever, Orange is like a speeding vehicle with a wheel missing: It doesn’t always steer steadily, you can feel the chassis shimmying and straining, but the velocity is urgent.
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Jun 5, 2014
Season 2 Review:
The show can be applauded for giving opportunities to a wide range of talented actresses and for representing a multiplicity of ethnicities and orientations in its characters, but the stories built around them are notable for their melodramatic underpinnings and an occasional willingness to resort to clichés.... But Ms. Kohan and her writers, abetted by their excellent cast, know how to leave us laughing.
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Jun 5, 2014
Season 2 Review:
Orange Is the New Black is as scatological as ever in the second season and leans awfully heavily on lesbian sex to the point of repetition. But where it shines most is when it shows the sense of dislocation inmates can have from being shuffled around with little explanation. Prisoners come and go, and they all seem to have a story.
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Jun 8, 2015
Season 3 Review:
Its world-building is so strong there’s too much material: the episodes tend to run near a full hour and yet feel jam-packed.... Even if it sometimes builds soapboxes and strawmen (Taryn Manning’s Pennsatucky sometimes exists to be a fake-toothed mouthpiece for Ignorant Conservative America), it remains as fresh and interesting as when it began.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 18, 2019
Season 7 Review:
There are moments throughout the 13 episodes when you might also wish to seek release, but don't bail before the poignant final bows over the credits, which reminds us what a remarkable and diverse ensemble once wire the orange. [22 Jul - 4 Aug 2019, p.7]
TV Guide MagazineJul 19, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Season 6 is a return to near-peak form. [23 Jul - 5 Aug 2018, p.10]
TV Guide MagazineJun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
The series stretches three days and long nights of the soul over 13 fitfully compelling but more often squirm-inducing chapters. [12-25 Jun 2017, p.14]
TV Guide MagazineJun 23, 2016
Season 4 Review:
Orange loses little steam in its fourth tour of duty, with extremes of dark comedy and bitter tragedy, often heartbreaking in its depiction of metal illness and addiction, devastating in its escalation of racial conflict after the prison's cold-blooded new corporate owners flood the cell block with new bodies, triggering a demographic power shift. [27 Jun - 10 Jul 2016, p.15]
Uncle BarkyJun 23, 2015
Season 3 Review:
This is still a quality, provocative series that’s unlike any other and has already been renewed for Season 4. But much work needs to be done during the off-season--beginning with restoring an ominous sense of disorder and peril in a place that’s gone more than a little too soft and soapy.
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Uncle BarkyJul 11, 2013
Season 1 Review:
Schilling, Prepon and Mulgrew are uniformly terrific throughout, whether in prison garb or flashback civilian clothes. But other characters are equally compelling, giving this series innumerable stories to tell for hopefully many seasons to come. Based on the first six of 13 episodes, Orange is the New Black has passed virtually every test with flying colors.
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Jul 10, 2019
Season 7 Review:
For as impossible a task as tying every loose end is, these last 13 episodes acquit themselves fairly well. But repetitive flashbacks and a couple hugely ambitious new plots unbalance the season and cause the series to make a shakier landing than it might have with some sharper focus.
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Jul 16, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Season 6 is indeed a marked improvement on Season 5. In fact, it’s even pretty good. But it also ends up highlighting the series’ overall weaknesses, making it more clear than ever just how frustrating it is when a show with this much promise loses sight of what could make it great.
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Jun 9, 2017
Season 5 Review:
In its fifth season, the most important takeaway is that Orange Is the New Black” is a show that continues to take gutsy, filthy risks--port-a-potties are a major plot device this season, with all the scatological torture that implies --when it could be resting on its beige-uniformed laurels. It works.
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Jun 17, 2016
Season 4 Review:
This fourth season is not pretending that things are funnier or more upbeat than they really are. Either by accident or design, Kohan and her team have found a way to pull the rug out from under its audience, with a sudden reminder of the horrors of mass incarceration.
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Jul 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Season six isn’t as messy as the show’s fifth season--which took place over just three days and chronicled a prison riot--but it’s also nowhere near as ambitious. It’s just good enough to make me interested in watching season seven, but not good enough to make me want to see anything beyond that.
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Jun 12, 2017
Season 5 Review:
This season of Orange gets better and better the longer it goes (though, weirdly, the slasher homage is dropped into the middle of the otherwise very good back half of the season), and the final three episodes go from strength to strength. ... There are a lot of plot holes and missteps along the way. But that doesn’t negate the power of the closing passages of the season.
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Jun 16, 2016
Season 4 Review:
Season 4 feels more like a drama than ever, and that’s not a bad thing. “Orange Is the New Black” has introduced a multitude of characters we don’t usually see on television and given them complicated and intimate relationships that speak volumes about issues not contained to prison’s impenetrable walls.
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Jun 11, 2015Jul 12, 2013
Season 1 Review:
In Jenji Kohan’s magnificent and thoroughly engrossing new series, Orange Is the New Black, prison is still the pits. But it is also filled with the entire range of human emotion and stories, all of which are brought vividly to life in a world where a stick of gum could ignite either a romance or a death threat.
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Jun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Nothing ever feels forced or repetitive about the show and its confined setting. In fact, it feels like the restriction has spurred even more creativity from the writers this year. There’s a fear and a scrappy anger to the dialogue and interactions happening around the prison, even more so than before.
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Jun 11, 2015
Season 3 Review:
The structure of most OITNB episodes--in which one character is brought to the fore and we see flashbacks to that person’s past history, details about how that woman or man was shaped and became the person she or he is--has by now, in the new season, become predictable, either comfortingly or tediously so, depending on your degree of engagement with the series.... It’s all pretty pleasant, even if the jokes are often corny.
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