Orange is the New Black

Tough, occasionally oppressive, and--against all odds--still funny when least expected.

The fifth season of the series continues in the pitched, passionate style that's Orange at its juiciest.

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.

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.

Despite the chaotic start, the new season mostly upholds the series’ honest, humorous look at the prison populace.

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.

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.

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.

Orange Is the New Black is a frequently great, occasionally maddening TV show. That’s still the case even in a season that only covers three days in the lives of its many, many, many intricate characters.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

The condensed timeline has made the sprawling series more confused than ever.

There are still moments of true joy, and actors (like Taystee’s Brooks) who are given the time and the emotional space to do extraordinary work. But like many sociological experiments, the outcome of this one isn’t the hoped-for result.

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.