The Netflix Original Series Orange is the the New Black is
The story of Piper, a woman in her thirties who is sentenced to 15 months in prison after she is convicted of a decade old crime of transporting money for her drug dealing girlfriend. – IMDB
I had heard a Moth podcast of Piper Kerman, the author of the memoir Orange Is The New Black: My Year In A Women’s Prison and became familiar with the story before I watched the series. Since this was Netflix, I could binge-watch until my laptop overheated.
The story is exactly as imagined with it’s main focus on Piper but it gives back-story to a different inmate every week as sort of “how did I get here?” narrative. Heavily pulling from the genre of “women behind bars,” there are explicit lesbian plot lines but other themes are race (they have a vote where each race can only vote for someone in their own race) and religion. Society under a glass.
Piper, being the WASP that she tries to be, spends most of the series looking like a doe in the headlights, disbelieving she could possibly seeing what is reality. Goldie Hawn-like.
Two personal notes: 1. in a flashback of Piper in her apartment before prison, the cookbook Plenty is on a bookshelf behind her and 2. while she’s in prison, she’s reading Gone Girl and has an ambivalent review of it.
Orange is the New Black has been renewed for another season. I look forward to next summer’s binge.