“Really?” Kohan said. “I have all the characters, and I have a beginning, and I have a secret that we’re not telling the audience.”
“The answer is yes,” Lewis said.
“All right, I gotta get out of the Orange swamp,” she said.
Negotiations were soon in progress—it was a potential show for her to do a few years from now, another off-ramp, another new baby. Retirement would have to wait.
* * *
—
The next day, June 22, Kohan went to the doctor to get beta-blockers for the premiere of GLOW. Later, as we entered an unfancy nail salon, she said, “I have trouble taking care of myself.” But by the time of the screening she had gone glam: Her nails were a color called Hologram, and she strutted the pink carpet in a blousy peasant dress in rainbow colors. After the show, Kohan, accompanied by Charlie and Oscar, headed to the premiere party. It was an especially exciting night for Oscar, who has a cameo in the pilot, as a tween thug who screams, “Fuck you, Nancy Reagan!” It was also the first time that Kohan’s sons had attended one of her professional events—normally, her wingman was her daughter, Eliza. At dinner the previous night, Charlie had told me that he didn’t love Orange—in fact, he’d dropped his mother’s show midway through Season 2. “I had a problem with Piper—I didn’t like her,” he said. “And there was this way that every time it got dramatic it would go the other way. I thought it sold itself out.”
“You’re one of those,” his mother told him fondly. She complains that when men tell her they like the show, they inevitably add, “I watch it with my girlfriend.” Eliza was the family’s Orange superfan.
Before the screening, Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive gave a speech thanking “Mama Jenji.” Mensch was postpartum, just as Kohan had been for the Weeds premiere. Afterward, Charlie was sweet to his mom, knowing that it had been hard for her to cede control, to be the one giving notes that got ignored. “I could see your touch on it,” he said.
The GLOW party was decorated like a neon locker room from the eighties. “Heaven Is a Place on Earth” played on the loudspeakers. As Kohan mingled, I chatted with two of her O.G. Orange crew, the filmmaker Sian Heder and the playwright Nick Jones. They marveled at their early, disorienting days under Kohan: She had everyone build ornate Lego models of prisons and go on extended hikes. Even after they broke the story for Season 1, they struggled. “One script would be like 30 Rock, another like The Shield,” Heder said. Heder felt especially anxious about writing a script that centered on Sophia Burset, the trans inmate. Every activist she called told her that it was a huge mistake to portray a trans character as a prisoner—at the very least, she should be wrongly convicted. Kohan encouraged Heder to stop soliciting outside opinions: She needed to write.
“Sian certainly voiced those concerns,” Kohan told me later. “They all did. Her name was going to be on it, and trans was becoming a hot-button thing. But you can’t be a totem and a person at the same time. I just kept saying, ‘This is the character, this is the person. This is this trans person.’ The message is: You gotta be fearless. If you get too wishy-washy and try to serve too many masters, you get nothing. You write in a vacuum and you hope it works.”
* * *
—
“She buys people’s complete collections of things!” Eliza complained to me. She was sitting on a space-age chair in the family’s new apartment in the West Village. “We have a room filled with a collection of Eight Balls—”
“Those Eight Balls were collected over time,” Kohan said.
“All those marbles. You did not collect those marbles.”
“I bought jars of marbles from all different places,” Kohan said, calmly. “That’s why they’re in all different jars. It’s a collection of jars of marbles. It’s not a collection of marbles.” She is a maximalist, she said: “Look, I feel better when there’s bulk. I think bulk is beautiful. I love a lot of something.”
Kohan adores Los Angeles, which she has gotten to know using the twin algorithms of “thrifting and food”: She and her husband sometimes drive their pit-bull mutt, Gail Feldman, to a neighborhood they’ve never visited, then explore it on foot. Right now, however, Noxon was hot for Manhattan. He and Eliza had been in the half-decorated apartment since late May, among trippy velvet sofas and coasters bearing the message “Don’t Fuck Up the Table.” Kohan, as usual, was overwhelmed by work, and shuttling between coasts: She was on deadline for her Orange script; she was scouting locations; she was preparing to help Mensch and Flahive get going on the room for Season 2 of GLOW.
Kohan and Noxon, who met at an adult kickball game, have been married for nearly twenty years. Noxon has published two books. The first was Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up. His second, Plus One, was more fraught: It was a beach read about a cable showrunner’s husband, who, feeling emasculated, acts out. Kohan wasn’t thrilled, but Noxon argued that it was his story, too. The impulse might be understandable, given the cannibalistic nature of their circle’s creativity: In addition to Weiner, they are close with Chris’s sister Marti Noxon, a TV writer whose show Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce has a character loosely based on Chris. But, whatever stress Plus One generated, the family is affectionate and eccentric, with shared comic rhythms and a self-conscious fascination with the awkwardness, the flawed wokeness, of their own L.A. set.
Eliza launched into a story about a seminar on racist language at her school, which began with a PowerPoint slide that read “White People: We’re Not Always Awesome.” Her school was also fighting a trend called “area codes”: Boys rate girls with three digits, for their face, body, and “DTF”-ness (politely: sexual eagerness). At a school assembly, Eliza said, a girl had declared that it was wrong to rate girls, that rating girls must stop, “and someone in the crowd said, ‘Shut up, 7!’ ”
The family exploded with laughter. “That’s the perfect number,” Kohan marveled. “I recognize that it’s reductive and sexist,” Chris added. “But on a scientific level, I admire its specificity.”
Similar stories have been worked into Kohan’s art. In a potent Orange flashback, Janae, back when she was a public school student, tears up as she watches an all-white Dreamgirls at an elite private school—a plot inspired by a mostly white production of The Wiz at Eliza’s summer camp. But Trump’s election victory has made issues of race and privilege far less abstract; it was a traumatic event for all of them. Just after November, Noxon was in Memphis promoting Plus One, the prospect of which—as he scribbled in a sketchbook—felt “stupid” and “inconsequential.” Noxon is also an illustrator, and in a burst of energy he produced a graphic story presenting the civil rights movement as an inspiration for the resistance. He posted it online, and it went viral. Soon, he had a new book to write, titled Good Trouble. He was just back from being arrested at a healthcare protest in Washington, D.C.
Noxon is a Democrat, but Kohan is a registered Independent. “I’m not a Republican,” she said. “But I think the Democratic Party is a mess, in a lot of ways. And I don’t necessarily like an affiliation.” For all her aversion to being preachy, she calls her work a form of activism. “I think my ideology isn’t that fuzzy, in the things that are approached on the show—and, while I don’t have time to be an activist, I can be an agitator.” She recalled attending a Clinton Foundation meeting in which a speaker described studies showing that babies whose mothers talk to them a lot develop stronger language skills—and then told her, “You could put this in your show.” That idea was translated into Kohan’s idiom in Season 2: A prisoner whose daughter has recently given birth crudely tells her, “Talk to the baby, so she doesn’t grow up stupid.”
* * *
—
Matthew Weiner met Kohan more than a decade ago at the school their children attend. They became close friends, and play pinochle together with their spouses. Kohan talks Weiner off cliffs of
self-doubt. “Don’t worry about running out of story,” she once told him. “There’s always more.” Kohan’s decision to burn down Agrestic, in Season 3 of Weeds, became Weiner’s watchword for artistic daring while writing Mad Men: It gave him the confidence to divorce Betty and Don, to start fresh without fear.
Weiner told me that Kohan rarely gets enough credit as a pioneer. “She’s braver than I am,” he said. “She’s a truly iconoclastic person who does not believe in BS. She’s a deep feminist, she’s a humanist, she’s very educated, but she’s really—and so quietly, without putting her personality in front of her work—she has consistently talked about what’s fair, about race, before anybody, about the trans world before anybody. About class, about privilege!” Her gift, he said, was to write about difficult subjects without jingoism, with a rich sense of psychology. She was ten years ahead of everybody.
He’s also inspired by her attitude toward criticism. During Mad Men, he recalled, he got frustrated by “people thinking I was a sexist when I was writing about sexism.” For Kohan, however, “the white guilt, all of it, it’s all funny to her—you know, it’s just delicious to her that people are going to be upset.” They share a philosophy: that it’s crucial not to give in to the impulse of wanting to please viewers, that it’s better to take the leap that might agitate people, if it can get you to a new place.
In an email, Shonda Rhimes praised Kohan’s kindness and candor, calling her one of the few showrunners with whom she can talk honestly about career strategy: “She’s the person I went to and said, ‘Tell me everything you know about Ted Sarandos’ ”—a top executive at Netflix. Rhimes had just launched Grey’s Anatomy when she met Kohan; she had been a Weeds fangirl, but when she heard about Orange she was “suspicious”: “It seemed to be a show about a rich white woman’s prison struggles, written by a white woman, when we know that white women are not the majority of people being victimized, forgotten, and destroyed by the prison system.” But, she went on, “the moment you watch the first episode, you know that the show is actually about women. All women…And there are stories told on that show from the perspectives of women of color—and trans women and lesbians—that I don’t think I’d ever seen before.”
I visited the set of Orange in early August. Kohan had finally finished her script, and filming was underway. She had other good news: Lifetime had green-lighted American Princess, the Renaissance faire show. The previous weekend, Kohan and Noxon and two of their kids had visited Upstate New York with Jamie Denbo, the show’s creator, to scout for stories at a Renaissance festival.
“Did you see the ring that Chris bought me in Oswego?” Kohan said, holding out her hand. I peered: It resembled a melted bronze dragon. “It’s a couple giving each other oral sex. See? She’s leaning over his cock; he’s on her pussy.” Romantic, I told Kohan. “He knows me,” she said.
Orange Is the New Black is not Entourage, the kind of fantasy series in which people bounce back from bad luck. In Season 6, past actions have repercussions; the new plots will be set in a maximum-security prison, with worse violence and uglier outcomes. Kohan, who calls herself a “cultural, book Jew,” takes a Talmud class, and she had been mulling over one of its themes: “How do two contradictory truths occupy the same space?” The actresses were returning from their hiatus, and they greeted Kohan effusively on the new set, with its isolated cells. Kate Mulgrew, who plays Red, the Russian cook, gave her a gift-wrapped copy of Roxane Gay’s Hunger. Adrienne Moore, who plays Black Cindy, talked about a recent trip to Berlin.
When Mulgrew and I talked in her dressing room, the actress, best known as Captain Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, described the thrill, after a long career of “very, very little golden stuff,” of finding a creator so “unorthodox and unafraid.” Danielle Brooks, similarly, called Kohan a “dope queen.” Orange was Brooks’s first TV job, straight out of Juilliard. In the premiere episode, which begins with a shower scene, Taystee pulls off Piper’s towel, saying, “Damn, you’ve got nice titties—you’ve got them TV titties.” Brooks, who is from a Christian family in South Carolina, “prayed on it” and nearly declined the role. But she told me that she’s grown to trust Kohan, grateful for her “deep care for disenfranchised women.”
Adrienne Moore, too, grew up in a Southern Christian family, but eventually moved to New York to study acting. (Kohan told me that she clumsily assumed that several cast members were amateurs, as with The Wire, until they mentioned Juilliard: “Okay, you’re a really good actress and I’m a racist.”) In Season 3, Black Cindy converted to Judaism, in a scene that was a surprise tearjerker. Kohan wrote it as comic, but Moore played it emotionally, drawing on her own history. These kinds of dynamics have shaped the show throughout its run: After the Latina actresses spoke up, the writers gave their characters specific ethnicities—and the Dominicans became distinct from the Puerto Ricans and the Mexicans. (Some performers chose to play cross-nationality: Flaca is Mexican, but is played by a Dominican American.)
One point of contention hovered: Kohan thinks it’s realistic that black inmates would use the N-word, but the cast resisted. Moore told me that it bothers her when the word is used as racial shorthand in pop culture. Kohan told me, “You can tell when things are just not worth it. I want them to do great work and have a good experience—and they are putting their bodies out there. There are certain lines where I’m like, ‘Just fucking say it.’ And lines where I’m like, ‘Okay.’ ”
Kohan values rude humor to the point that she sometimes veers into the language of the right. An offensive joke, she told me, “is not going to melt you!” Cindy Holland, who green-lighted the show for Netflix, told me that, though Kohan is collaborative, she’d learned to “never give her a note on a joke, because she’ll double down.” When I expressed qualms about the jokes made by the show’s Nazi inmates, Kohan said, “I’m shocked by what comes out of people’s mouths outside a PC bubble. I want to represent it.” The inmates, she said, “are trying to be funny, and it’s not funny, and they think it’s hysterical—and that’s kind of a punch in the head. I like that they made you uncomfortable.” An unsettling scene should be “like a Weeble that doesn’t fall down, that just keeps tottering.”
In one of Season 3’s best gags, a cost-cutting executive at the prison describes a “Jewish problem”—too many inmates ordering expensive kosher meals—then notes that he has found a cheaper source for soap. A colleague shoots back, “Is it the Jews?” It’s crass, a shocker, perfectly delivered. But an even better punch line follows: The employee is reported to HR and fired. In the private-prison industry, it seems, exploiting inmates is business as usual, but breaking a speech code is a crime. Netflix airs in Germany. Although the streaming service cleared the bit with its lawyers, Kohan was strongly urged to cut it: In Berlin, Holocaust jokes are verboten. She kept it in.
* * *
—
The last time I spoke to Kohan, she was finally on vacation—though not a real vacation, since she was polishing new Orange scripts. She was in New England, staying at Shonda Rhimes’s country house. Kohan’s plate was heaped with pie. GLOW had gotten a second-season pickup, and she was prepping for American Princess. Carolina Paiz’s Backyards, however, had hit a snag: There was a competing show about Latino teens. Kohan wanted to be supportive of her disappointed writer, but it was hard. She knew that Paiz had “spilled her guts into this thing,” but added, “I’ve spent my life building bibles for things that get tossed out—it is brutal, but it teaches you to move on.”
Mostly, however, she had been watching the Charlottesville riots. Two days earlier, Kohan had described her work to me as a cathartic rebellion within a quiet life. “It’s fun to create fireworks and see oohs and aahs,” she had said. Battle could be exhilarating, controversy was fun. Now she was rattled, finding both the Nazi marches and Trump’s response “terrifying, appalling.” She said, “I intellectually understand where these people come from—ha
te always comes from pain, to a certain extent. Doesn’t make it okay.”
When I asked for her response as a free-speech absolutist, she struggled. “Right,” she said. “I never want to say that people can’t say how they feel, including their hatred.” But this was about intimidation as well as speech, she recognized. “It is a call to action for the complacent, to stop letting these fringe hate-mongers have the floor,” she said with emotion. “I don’t think the answer is ‘You can’t say that’—but you’re not entitled to take over city streets and start shit.” On some of her most foundational issues, she felt at sea. “I think there’s a hard line here of ‘This is unacceptable.’ So that feels uncomfortable—that isn’t something that’s in my wheelhouse, that’s not part of my worldview.”
The green lights for new shows hadn’t entirely raised her spirits. “I’m a depressive, a dysthymic,” she said. “So I have to summon sunshine. I don’t come by it easily.” What she longed for was the time to wander, to observe, to collect and absorb, to “fill her tank.” She was relishing time with her kids. In her work, however, she described herself as drowning—going underwater, then up, under, then up, like a witch being dunked. We’d sat together at the Renaissance festival, in the late afternoon, watching a dunking: torture turned into vaudeville, making tired families giggle and cheer. “I would like to find a little more pure joy!” she said, as if she were conjuring a path into the future, one she had yet to imagine. “I’m traveling in dark waters right now.”
A DISAPPOINTED FAN IS STILL A FAN
Lost
New York magazine, May 28, 2010
Like “The Long Con,” this essay was written quickly, in response to the divisive finale of a popular series. Like my pan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, it won me a wave of mail from fellow “haters.” But while it was a cathartic piece to publish, it always gives me a twinge upon rereading, because there’s something cruel about analyzing how a show that you loved declined, no matter how on-target it may feel.
I Like to Watch Page 31