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Mixed:
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Critic Reviews
The GuardianDec 3, 2019
Season 7 Review:
The show mostly resists the temptation to say goodbye with a greatest hits tour, but it certainly gets the band playing some familiar tunes. It will be hard to find any fan with a complaint, given that all the favourites, and some surprises, get at least a little screen time, especially in the final episode. Even the chickens make a comeback. Not all of it works – Daya’s evolution into ice-cold top dog is cartoonish, for example – but it never lacks heart.
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Jul 29, 2019
Season 7 Review:
The show’s humor is key to its appeal, but in the weaker midseason episodes, it can feel like spoonfuls of sugar to make the pedantic bitterness go down. ... And yet for all its faults, it’s difficult to think of another show that stares so unblinkingly at the most egregious excesses of American capitalism and bureaucracy and injustice, and does so while rarely losing sight of the humanity of the people, especially the women, involved.
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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]
Jul 15, 2019
Season 7 Review:
Ending a long-running series is fraught with obligation — story lines must be wrapped up, questions must be answered, characters must be honored. It’s a daunting task for a show with such a sprawling ensemble — there are 19 stars listed in the opening credits alone — but overall, OITNB delivers.
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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 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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Jul 27, 2018
Jul 27, 2018
Season 6 Review:
When both are in balance (Season Two’s arc with Vee), the series feels special, and like nothing else even within Peak TV. When they’re not (as was the case in the riot season), it can be hard to see how the two halves are part of the same show, for quality reasons as much as tonal ones. Season Six is in that more uneven vein.
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Jul 20, 2018
Season 6 Review:
The story that propels the 13 episodes is more focused and on a smaller scale than what was attempted last year, which isn't entirely unwelcome. But it's not always clear which big issues and ideas the writers set out to address in the new season. As it stands, Orange Is the New Black remains a show so full of rich characters, ripping dialogue and great performances that I can focus on those things and not the characters or storylines that don't work.
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TV Guide MagazineJul 19, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Season 6 is a return to near-peak form. [23 Jul - 5 Aug 2018, p.10]
Jul 18, 2018
Season 6 Review:
Orange Is the New Black remains a worthwhile series, retaining its place as one of the strongest Netflix dramas. But the show’s commitment to telling all of its stories has become wildly overgrown, like a tree desperately in need of pruning. It has everything it needs, but it also has way, way too much.
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Jul 17, 2018
Season 6 Review:
The series has always treated its characters with indiscriminate humanity and nuance, and it regards its new characters in a similar fashion. ... These characters are a refreshing addition to the series, but audiences may be left wanting for more information about all the other Orange Is the New Black regulars who were sent to a prison in Ohio.
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Jul 17, 2018Jul 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 16, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Viewers are likely to be just as polarized by the riot, which undermines the humanity of some of Litchfield’s inmates by showing them embracing violent vengeance. Like it or hate it, though, this season of the award-winning show manages to feel more relevant than ever.
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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 9, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Even the best performances and moments suffer from the season’s lack of focus, inability to shift tonal gears smoothly, and Netflix bloat (the siege might’ve worked better as a more compact arc rather than a 13-episode extravaganza). Points for audacity notwithstanding--this is another instance of an ambitious and unusual series writing conceptual checks that its storytelling prowess can’t cash.
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The Daily BeastJun 9, 2017
Season 5 Review:
In addition to being OITNB’s riskiest season yet, this is also its messiest. The lows are pretty low. ... But the highs are the show at its best: profound and funny, and simultaneously spotlighting and elucidating the ways in which women and minorities are oppressed, villainized, and ignored, often all at once. Still, that surfaces the show’s most fatal and longest-running flaw. There are so many characters—too many, in fact.
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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 9, 2017
Season 5 Review:
The fallout, partly because of the size of the sprawling cast, partly because of the tonal shifts, sometimes within the same scene, can be jarring. Orange nails the dramatic moments. It’s the comedy that ranges from banter to slapstick and back that feels out of place, especially as the rioting wears on.
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Jun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Though the compressed timeline may have seemed like a way to narrow the show’s focus, it ironically causes plotlines to feel more vague and messy. The result is a season that, remarkably, sees the series biting off more than it can chew for the first time in its run.
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Jun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
Orange is the New Black has always been more about characters than story, but the structure of Season 5 -- after the fourth's emotional cliffhanger -- puts that formula to the test, as the prison-uprising plot line drags on until it's easy to start feeling a little stir crazy.
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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 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
In some cases, the heightened stakes of the season help deliver some of the show's best performances yet and beats of staggering emotion. In other cases, a series that has reliably been careful to treat even the ugliest behavior with nuance pushes to such extremes that it threatens to undermine a lot of what came before.
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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]
Jun 8, 2017
Season 5 Review:
A few of the strands are engaging, particularly those involving the inmates led by Taystee (Danielle Brooks) who seek justice for Poussey, even if overacting is afoot in some of those scenes. But most of the strands are either dull because of the slightness of their plots or merely irritating.
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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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IndieWireMay 30, 2017
Season 5 Review:
This season was almost told in real time, with the 13 episodes taking place over the course of about days. ... It’s a choice that does elevate this season and give it new focus and directive. ... But, as the show has always struggled with tone, in later episodes the series delves far more into horror tropes than you might expect, in legitimately horrifying ways.
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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]
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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Jun 17, 2016
Season 4 Review:
For all its faults, from some off-kilter performances and sometimes clumsy articulations of overarching themes, Orange Is the New Black feels as sublime as ever for so intuitively recognizing that even the little joys that prison life can bring to an inmate are deceptive, as they too hinge on a relinquishing of power.
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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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ColliderJun 16, 2016
Season 4 Review:
Time management has never been the show’s strength, and the flashbacks can really put a spotlight on those woes. And yet, spending any small amount of time again with Taystee (Danielle Brooks) who has a new office job with Caputo, or Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba) as she wades through the waters of a doomed romance, or Lorna (Yael Stone) engaging her imaginary life with a real-live husband, feels like seeing old friends.
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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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The Daily BeastJun 12, 2015
Season 3 Review:
This season is more concerned with continuing to make its way through the lives of the women who occupy Litchfield Prison, and, with a few misses here and there, is so lived-in in its narrative voice and settled in its “Backstory of the Week” format that you’re quickly at peace and on board with the season’s new direction and slightly more upbeat tone.
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Jun 11, 2015
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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Jun 11, 2015
Season 3 Review:
Three seasons in, just about everyone on the show is loveable. This makes for a thoroughly enjoyable, but not particularly varied or gripping viewing experience: the show tugs the same heartstrings, works the same funny bones.... Orange would rather make prison look good than make its characters look bad, a jarring streak of timidity.
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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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Jun 6, 2014
Season 2 Review:
Just as in TV’s first flashback-heavy, multi-character drama “Lost,” it’s the flashbacks that deepen and humanize the characters, and that makes Orange a unique and outstanding series. Piper’s story may draw viewers to the show, but it’s her fellow inmates who make time spent inside this women’s prison worthwhile.
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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 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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