#oitnb discussion

I’ve said that exact first sentence so many times, haha. 

I never watched the last season so I can’t comment on that... idk, it’s hard to assess them in retrospect. I still think their story was really compelling for the first two seasons, the level of longing and the ‘I feel like my best self with this person and no one else will do,’ and to a lesser extent seasons 3 and 4... or at least, the version of them we collectively headcanoned. But at a certain point the show just didn’t know what to do with them, or really any of the characters, without having them just repeat patterns of behavior they’d ostensibly already grown out of it. It got tiring across the board.

Honestly OITNB as a whole is difficult to assess, because by the end of its run it felt obsolete precisely because the show itself had taught us to expect more/better out of media. I never watched Transparent, but I think that was a similar situation--we didn’t need those shows any more by the end because they had such an impact on the industry that they were subsequently lapped by the shows they paved the way for. 

I think it’s really easy to forget how dire it was for stories written for/by women on television for most of the 2000s. The “Golden Age” drama landscape was truly so obsessed with anti-heroes and so barren of, if not downright hostile to, stories about messy female narratives--let alone queer ones, and certainly not queer women of color. There were rare niche exceptions like Nurse Jackie and Damages, but most of the female characters on the big budget, high-brow, marquee dramas were either the punchline or the punching bag. They were frothy and sex-crazed and silly, or they were wet blanket wives getting in the way. And as far as ensembles go... like, nobody was taking the The L Word seriously.

The change in that storytelling landscape pre- and post-OITNB (streaming in general, but OITNB was the proof case) was a massive, massive shift, and in that sense I think you could make the case that it was one of the most influential shows of the decade. I don’t think you get Sense8, Pose, Vida, or Jane the Virgin without it, and probably not shows like Handmaid’s Tale, Insecure, Fleabag, or Russian Doll either. 

So yeah, like, OITNB undoubtedly turned into a disappointment after two really good seasons. But those two seasons seemed to change everything in terms of what type of stories were getting told on television (or at least cable and streaming... the credit on network probably belongs to Shonda Rhimes).

I think, overall, this was my favorite since season 2. Like I said, it had pacing issues--a number of the early episodes felt like wayy too long, and making it to the midpoint of the season was a bit of a slog at times. There was a lot of jumping around to separate, scattered subplots, with scenes didn’t interlock enough to stay consistently compelling (as has been an issue on the show for a while now). 

But there were also some big improvements this season over issues from S3-5: narrowing the focus down to the a core group of characters (so long, meth heads and white supremacists! pls never come back), doing a better job of setting up and integrating the new characters (who were much, much better developed & interesting than the newbies of the last few). S6 was less ambitious with its storytelling, but it was more even-keeled, provided a much needed break from the frantic pace, excessive onscreen violence, and head-spinning tonal shifts of the last few years. The show still doesn’t know what to do with certain characters (Red), but I’ll take S6′s dullish subplots over the head-scratchingly stupid ones (Red in S5, Toast Norma, etc) we’ve been subjected to in the past.

Some more specific storyline thoughts: