I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  Despite such tensions, Weeds was a hit, and although it never got the acclaim that some prestige-cable bigs did, it had its own rude verve, a destabilizing female protagonist long before Girls or Scandal and a portrait of drug dealing before Breaking Bad. In the final seasons, the plot took risks that it couldn’t sustain; Kohan began hunting for a fresh project—and when she optioned Orange Is the New Black, it developed so fast that the two shows overlapped. “I always love the new baby,” she told me regretfully.

  Orange, which Netflix first released in 2013, was based on a memoir by Piper Kerman, who went to prison in Connecticut for crimes that she committed with her ex-girlfriend, a heroin smuggler. Despite its lively title, the book was muted and ideologically earnest, with nonintrusive portraits of Piper’s fellow inmates. Kohan saw an opportunity to expand that material with bawdier, more bravura storytelling, with women of every background, sexual identity, and ethnicity shoved into close proximity. Like Nancy Botwin, Piper was a rich, white female criminal. But what was revelatory was the world around her: dozens of brown and black faces, fat inmates and butch dykes, old women with wrinkles and paunches—a cast of female unknowns who on other shows would be no more than extras. In Kohan’s universe, they would get to be loud, to be funny, to get naked, to have sex without being beautiful, and to be at the story’s center. The trans actress Laverne Cox played the trans inmate Sophia Burset, a year before Jill Soloway created Transparent.

  Orange shared with Weeds a volatile blend of comedy and drama—a dilemma for the Emmys, which, from year to year, gave Orange nominations in different categories. A series that released entire seasons at once, it was included in Netflix’s debut launch of original content, back when streaming was an experimental model. Because the show was comedic, female, and sex-centered, critics found it easy to patronize: The Times snootily compared it to Gossip Girl. But, like The Wire, Orange was a game changer, courting empathy and discomfort, titillation and sobs, often in the same scene. It was a soapbox for policy debates—about prison privatization, solitary confinement, mental illness—but it was allergic to pedantry. The emphasis was on the individual; extended flashbacks, in the manner of Lost, provided psychological context for both inmates and guards. The theme, in Kohan’s words, was: “You are not your crime.”

  At the firepit, Kohan said she was thinking of quitting TV. She might let her hair go gray; she wanted to travel; working on such painful material was depressing. (“Why didn’t I write this Hawaii show?” she moaned the next day in her office. “I’ve not been smart personally about taking this shit on.”) She’d recently had a setback: HBO had rejected a pilot that she’d co-written about witches, directed by Gus Van Sant, called The Devil You Know, which she had imagined as a kind of “Inglourious Basterds of Salem”—the coven would win. Worse, her kids were leaving home. Even Oscar, whom she called “my surprise Weeds baby,” was turning twelve. “Showrunning is like a pie-eating contest, where the prize is more pie,” she told me, quoting a friend, and added that she and Shonda Rhimes have scheduled a lunch to discuss such feelings. (This was a month before Rhimes ordered a fresh batch of pies, cutting a major deal with Netflix.) Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men and a friend of Kohan’s, had recently texted her photos of Paris, where he was filming a new show, and it made her ache. “He has written himself into Paris, and I have written myself into prison,” she said. She emphasized that her suffering wasn’t remotely comparable to that of someone who is incarcerated. Nevertheless, she said, “my daily thoughts are of injustice and of horror, and I do have certain regrets about it.”

  Kohan’s fantasies of retirement, however, contradicted nearly everything else she told me. Orange Is the New Black, which had an ambitious but flawed fifth season, was about to begin its sixth year of production—her first script was due, and she was contractually obligated for seven seasons. Meanwhile, she’d been pitching as madly as she had before Weeds, experimenting with godmothering projects for her writers. Her first such collaboration, GLOW, a playful Netflix show about female wrestlers, would debut that week, on June 23. It was created by Carly Mensch, from Weeds, and Liz Flahive, from Nurse Jackie, but it was a very Kohan concept, with a neon-bright, polyglot female ensemble.

  Kohan was also co-writing a Teen Jesus pilot—a kind of Wonder Years about the Savior—in collaboration with Mensch’s husband, Latif Nasser, a Canadian radio producer who is a secular Muslim. “I like that the Jew and the Muslim are writing the script,” she joked. She was trying to sell American Princess, a rom-comish pilot by the actress and comedian Jamie Denbo, about a socialite who joins a Renaissance faire. And Kohan was seeking a buyer for Backyards, about Latino punk teens, which had been conceived by Carolina Paiz, a writer on Orange. Kohan had other ideas, too, including a bilingual show about a family-owned Korean spa, and another about an L.A. family that goes globe-trotting.

  She couldn’t explain why she was both contemplating quitting and leveling up to the role of super-showrunner, in the tradition of Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. But she could define what had driven her this far. “I finally found a word for it,” Kohan said. “Have you ever seen Chef’s Table?” The show, on Netflix, had an episode about a woman from a family of fish distributors, whose relatives told her that women couldn’t be restaurateurs. “And she’s the foremost female kaiseki chef in the world!” Kohan exclaimed, grinning. “She said, ‘There’s a term in Japanese, kuyashii.’ And she said, ‘It means, “I’ll show you.” ’ ”

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  A few years ago, Kohan bought the Hayworth Theatre, near Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, a rundown revival theater where she used to see movies with her mom. Rumor had it, she said, that the theater had been owned by Rita Hayworth’s father, and when I told her that this sounded glamorous, she reminded me of Hayworth’s story by cracking, “Well, he probably fingered her in every room in the place.”

  Three years ago, Linda Brettler, an architect who is married to Matthew Weiner, began renovations. The result is a spectacular set of offices, with one floor for production and two for post-production. (There’s also a nursery, complete with toys and a changing table.) Kohan is thinking of turning the old auditorium into a venue for performances, like the L.A. institution Largo. The new neighborhood was an adjustment. “Someone shit in our doorway the first time we moved in,” Kohan told me. “They stole my mailbox. They stole the mezuzah! We just keep cleaning it up.” As for the mezuzah, she joked, “It’s puzzling. Maybe they thought, Oh, this is the Jews’ magic thing.”

  Next to Kohan’s office, with its loft bed and its framed African American alphabet cards (“ ‘S’ is for Soul Sister”), is the Orange writers’ room. When I visited, the place looked like an artsy preschool crossed with a rehab center: There was a “comfort sweater” for anyone who felt vulnerable, plus a long table piled with markers, coloring books, and Kinetic Sand, along with such self-help books as The Five Love Languages and a memoir by the prison activist Susan Burton. Plot points for Season 6 were scribbled all over the walls. Kohan oversees each script, but her co-producer, Tara Herrmann, often runs the room. Although Kohan has never been given a diagnosis of ADD, she gets why Devon Shepard used that description. “I have a hard time focusing,” she told me. “That’s why the toys are there—so I have something to color.”

  Almost all the writers are new. Last season, Kohan and Herrmann acknowledge, went somewhat pear-shaped. Season 4 had ended on a heartbreaking note: A key character, the black lesbian Poussey Washington, a gentle iconoclast with prospects for a life after prison, was killed by an inexperienced white guard. A riot broke out. Season 5 traced the riot: Thirteen episodes covered three tumultuous days, during which a set of African American characters, led by Poussey’s friend Taystee (the wonderful Danielle Brooks), tried to negotiate for improvements in the prison. The season ended strong, and it made daring structural leaps—one of Kohan’s trademarks on Weeds—but it felt coarser, too, and more vi
olent, with slack midseason pacing that led some viewers to stop watching.

  Kohan and Herrmann described the problem in similar terms. “We had lost a bunch of the original writers,” Herrmann said. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was just a new dynamic—people were attached to the characters as viewers, not as creators.” Kohan described some plots as “fan fiction.” She often spoke, with nostalgia, of the show’s “O.G. writers,” among them Nick Jones and Sian Heder, who now worked on GLOW, and Lauren Morelli, who had her own Netflix deal. After Season 5, only two writers were rehired.

  The new crew included sitcom veterans, a playwright, a refugee from the procedural Bones, and a novelist, Merritt Tierce, whom Kohan met at MacDowell, the artists’ retreat in New Hampshire. (Kohan meant to write fiction, and instead rewatched The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, a quirky, genre-blending cult series that was one of her formative influences.) Many of the writers had crazy interview stories: Kohan is infamous for asking inappropriate questions. Years ago, after reading a twisted writing sample from Morelli, Kohan asked her, “So, were you interfered with?” Morelli, unsure that she was hearing correctly, looked to Herrmann, who clarified: “She means ‘Were you molested?’ ” (Morelli wasn’t.) “I tend to be an id,” Kohan told me.

  Kohan, who is not on Twitter, received some scorn on the social network after a photograph of the Season 5 writers’ room, showing mostly white faces, was posted. The new room was more than three-quarters female, and included a gay man, an Indian Canadian woman, an African American man, a Guatemalan woman, and an Asian American female writer’s assistant. There were no straight white men. Kohan is resistant to all such accounting; she refuses to cheerlead for numerical diversity. Writing, she argues, is an occult skill, a gift of invention and empathy, which few people possess and which can be nurtured but not taught.

  It’s a perverse irony that Orange, which was initially hailed as a progressive breakthrough—a show that celebrated the stories of poor inmates, many of color—got caught up in a tense conversation about racial representation behind the camera. Ryan Murphy, the creator of such shows as American Horror Story, now promises viewers that women will direct half of a season’s episodes. There’s a swell of criticism directed at shows about black people that were created by white people—most recently, Confederate, an if-the-South-had-won-the-Civil-War fantasy that HBO is developing. Kohan bristles at such debates. When networks hire writers, she acknowledged, “There is a close circle in terms of getting access, if you’re outside of the clique.” She continued, “There should be an effort made. But, in the end, I just want talent.” She told me a Hollywood legend about Redd Foxx firing the white writers for Sanford and Son, and then, upon reading a new script, yelling, “Bring me my Jews! Bring me my Jews!”

  “If there’s one thing I believe, it’s against fundamentalism,” she told me. She doesn’t care if her characters are likable; she believes that the friction of offensiveness can push a debate forward. Kohan herself has a variety of impolite opinions. We debated whether the situation of Rachel Dolezal—the white activist who presented herself as black—might be analogous to transgender politics. At another point, Kohan argued that, if we are not our crimes, this is true for sex offenders, too, including Donuts, a guard on Orange. “Is he a rapist and that’s all he is?” she said. When asked about the notorious 2004 lawsuit that exposed crass behavior by the writers of Friends, Kohan said that there’s no point in suing a writers’ room: “You just have to quit the job.” (Her argument was mainly pragmatic, she added. In Hollywood, writing a new pilot reinvents you.) Over lunch one day, the writers discussed Bill Cosby’s trial; Kohan was largely quiet, but eventually chimed in, “I wonder if people are having trouble now enjoying”—infinitesimal pause—“Jell-O pudding products.”

  She rolls her eyes at feminist talk of “the male gaze.” Although she and Jill Soloway, the creator of Transparent, have known each other for years, their artistic philosophies split at the root: It’s notable that Soloway’s company is called Topple, for “topple the patriarchy,” and Kohan’s is called Tilted. Three years ago, when Soloway was launching a “transaffirmative-action program” for her writers’ room, they sparred on a panel that I moderated; Kohan said that trans people had been interviewed by her staff, but she insisted that a great writer can channel any identity. Years later, although Kohan’s values hadn’t budged, she had to admit that Soloway’s diversity effort had paid off, launching the trans writer Our Lady J, who was behind last year’s best episode of Transparent. Both showrunners are feminist provocateurs, but Kohan relishes being a mischief-maker and, sometimes, a smutty ringmaster. She lobbies performers for more nudity. Once, she told me, she wanted a shy actor to do a full-frontal scene; her producer, who was reluctant to ask the man, convinced Kohan that the guy had a forked penis.

  Uncharacteristically for a modern cable impresario, Kohan has little interest in anything “cinematic,” barring occasional one-time visual flourishes. (Each Weeds season finale echoed the style of a famous director: Tarantino, Hitchcock, Almodóvar.) In an era in which Jane Campion and Steven Soderbergh make TV, Kohan told me, “This isn’t a director’s medium! It’s not auteur territory. I’m the auteur in television.” Her origins were in sitcom rooms, not indie-movie sets, she said, and she wanted faces, and enough coverage to edit, not fancy tracking shots.

  Kohan has a deep, occasionally prickly aversion to even a hint of censorship, which goes back to her childhood. In fifth grade, she wrote a play in which an Asian character brought Sleeping Beauty a gift of egg foo yong. The white boy playing the Asian role improvised slanty eyes, leading a Chinese American teacher to cancel the play. “And I went crazy,” Kohan said. “Yes—it’s totally offensive! But he was also nine or ten. If you want to have a cultural-sensitivity discussion, great. But to say, ‘You’re bad, you offend me, this play cannot go on’—fuck you. Then I was supposed to write a letter of apology, and I refused.” Her mom backed her. Kohan described her attitude on these issues as old-school, “very ACLU.”

  And yet as resistant as Kohan is to anything that strikes her as political groupthink, the show she runs has been deeply responsive to modern conversations about race and power, responding with humanity and nuance to the shifting zeitgeist. In 2012, when Orange began production, prison reform was a bipartisan movement. By Season 4, Black Lives Matter had become prominent; Season 6 may make references to Trump’s ascent. Like Weeds, Orange has grown bleaker each year, as the show has developed a caustic clarity about systemic racism, prison privatization, and the sadism of guards. (Piper Kerman complained, Kohan told me, that the show’s guards were unrealistically kind.) Orange was not one privileged prisoner’s story, Kohan said, and that had never been the aim: “I like an ensemble. It’s gluttony—I like a little piece of this, a little piece of that.” The show’s broad sympathies, its willingness to explore every perspective, have alienated some viewers: Some were unwilling to get inside the head of Healy, the bigoted white male counselor; others, especially some African American female viewers, saw Poussey’s death as trauma porn. Kohan was rankled by some of these critiques, but she’s willing to poke bruises: “Good, go and argue about it.”

  As Piper receded into the ensemble of Orange, a different character, Taystee—black and poor, not rich and white—took center stage. A bubbly jokester in the first season, Taystee eventually became the acting secretary for the warden, Joe Caputo. Poussey’s death radicalized her, however; suddenly, she could see how her white boss’s “niceness” had blinded her—in a crisis, his sympathy went to the man who killed her friend Poussey. Kohan told me that these shifts weren’t abstract political changes—they simply followed the story. “This is going to sound woo, but I’m from L.A.,” she said. “Things have a destiny, and you want to see them fulfill their destiny. We don’t go in saying, ‘How are we going to deal with the black characters?’ We say, ‘What are we going to do with Taystee or Janae?’ ” Kohan was i
ntent on dramatizing how power worked, but she was also resolute about character being key, not ideology: “Otherwise, it’s an issues class. It’s an entertainment, and you have to be mindful of that.”

  While I was visiting Kohan’s office, she met with executives from Amazon. Lifetime had delayed in picking up American Princess, the Renaissance faire show, and Kohan wanted to shop it elsewhere. Netflix, Amazon, Facebook—she’s open to all comers. As they discussed Princess and Kohan talked up her many protégées, Tara Herrmann, the Orange co-producer, noted that Kohan gets bored in the later seasons of her shows.

  “I like giving birth,” Kohan said, shrugging.

  “Literally and figuratively,” Herrmann said.

  Kohan pitched her idea of a show about a Korean spa, which she hoped to write with a Korean partner. It would touch on themes of immigration, she said—not just the Korean family who owns the place but the Latino employees who clean it.

  “A lot of nudity,” Joe Lewis, Amazon’s head of comedy, drama, and VR, remarked.

  Yes, Kohan said. She described visiting a Korean spa in Queens that was very “accepting,” with people “every color under the sun” in hot tubs on the roof. One time, she’d seen “Orthodox boys from Monsey,” in Upstate New York, ogling women in bikinis.

  Lewis emphasized that Amazon, as a global company, was seeking diverse, experimental voices and was eager to acquire shows set in other countries. Earlier in the meeting, Kohan had mentioned her concept about a family that travels around the world. Lewis looped back to it. “The travel thing—if you wanted to do it, we would do it today,” he said.