For better or worse, bingeing is now so common that a term for watching one episode of TV at a time would be more useful. I remember marathoning the season in a weekend, spurred on by my impatience to know everyone in Orange’s tremendous cast of characters. Kohan’s show played no small part in converting skeptics.
Viewers who now regularly consume a full season’s worth of a given series within 24 hours still weren’t sure that they could get used to this new form of couch potato–dom. Hulu lacked a big hit until The Handmaid’s Tale premiered in April 2017.)Īs such, the phrase “binge watching” was just starting to gain currency when the first season of Orange-all 13 hours of it-showed up on Netflix. Hulu and Amazon were also dipping toes into the original-content pool, though the latter was essentially crowdsourcing and neither had produced a signature series. Netflix launched its first high-profile original, House of Cards, that February. But it would be hard to underestimate how much has changed on the small screen since 2013. Friends ran for a decade The Simpsons is about to turn 30. Six years may not seem like a long time in the history of TV. More than a bold experiment in representational sleight of hand, Orange became the most influential show of the decade. Brought to bear on her expansive vision at a critical moment in the rise of streaming, that freedom yielded a series that smoothed the transition from cable’s 2000s golden age to the vibrant and diverse, if fragmented, era that’s come to be known as Peak TV.
Kohan’s timing was perfect: New to developing original programming, the service granted her a lot of leeway. When HBO and Showtime failed to open their gates, she took the horse to Netflix. Kohan famously conceived Schilling’s heavily fictionalized Piper Chapman as a Trojan horse for smuggling in dozens of women Hollywood historically ignored-poor women, black women, brown women, trans women, immigrant women, elderly women, mentally ill women, women with double-digit dress sizes. In fact, as fans- 105 million of them, according to Netflix-who’ve made it both the most-watched original series and the best-loved show in the service’s library are well aware, Orange was always a more ambitious project than that. Created by Jenji Kohan, the maverick writer-producer behind Showtime’s Weeds, and based on Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same cumbersome name, Orange sounded, at first, like a pulpy look at women in prison as seen through the audience-friendly eyes of a pretty bisexual WASP from gentrified Brooklyn (Taylor Schilling). But the quip is also a winking commentary on the expectations viewers have been projecting on the Netflix dramedy even since before its July 2013 premiere. They’re also privileged white women who couldn’t have foreseen what awaited them when they reported to Litchfield Penitentiary, the fictional upstate New York minimum-security prison where the show’s first five seasons take place. The joke works on multiple levels: Nicky and Alex are lesbians. “Prison is just not as romantic as all those ’70s exploitation movies made it out to be,” Nicky Nichols, an inmate played by Natasha Lyonne, says to Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) in the emotional seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black.