by Joy Press
Amid all this disappointment, Netflix swooped in. An online movie-rental store, Netflix had grand ambitions to create and stream original content. So far, it had bought only one series, a political drama called House of Cards that hadn’t yet aired. It needed Kohan to lend it creative credibility and nab the public’s attention, as she had helped do for Showtime. So Netflix tempted Kohan with an enticing offer: the chance to make thirteen hour-long episodes, with no test pilot required and minimal network interference.
While the Weeds scribes worked on the Botwins’ final season, Kohan brought in a new group of writers to work on Orange Is the New Black in the same building at Universal Studios. “Weeds was her baby, so those of us on Orange, we kind of felt like we were the redheaded stepchildren living in the basement,” says Sian Heder, who wrote for the show’s first four seasons. “We were the new kids. And we had a pretty daunting task, because there was no pilot.” Kohan had originally cowritten a script with House producer Liz Friedman, but the partnership had not worked out. “There was a pilot that she wasn’t happy with, and we weren’t allowed to see it, so we just talked about the book and what the show could be,” says Nick Jones, a playwright who moved to Los Angeles to work on the show. “I was surprised at how unstructured it all was. We seemed to spend weeks just getting to know each other and going on walks and just talking about issues.” They also met former inmates and visited a women’s state prison.
Orange’s author, Piper Kerman, is a college-educated Brooklyn woman who ended up in jail for a youthful stint as a drug dealer. Her memoir offers a personal view of the dynamics among female prisoners. A few figures stand out, such as Pop, the Russian mobster’s wife; Morena, a Latina prisoner with crazy eyes; and Pornstar, a mustachioed prison guard. Kohan quickly realized that, for legal and creative reasons, they’d have to change some characters and invent others. She deemed the blond, fictional version of Piper her “Trojan horse,” explaining to an audience at a 2014 live event, “If you go into a network and say, ‘I want to do a show about poor Latinas and black women and their issues,’ it’s not a big selling tool. The Private Benjamin/white girl/fish-out-of-water conceit is familiar, and it’s an easier sell—but it was never my intention to just tell Piper’s story; it was a gateway to all the stories.”
With no model to work from and no actors yet attached to the series, the writers were flying blind. For instance, they knew Kohan wanted a transgender character in the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary, ideally to be played by an actual trans actor, but that was pretty much all they had to go on. So, when Heder wrote the script for Orange’s third episode, which gave viewers Sophia Burset’s backstory, she had to keep an open mind. “I thought, This could be a working-class white person, this could be an African American person,” Heder says. “I just had to create a great story and be adaptable with the dialogue or that person’s mannerisms.”
Kohan wanted to base Orange in Los Angeles, where her three kids were happily ensconced in school, but the studio preferred New York, for tax reasons. As a compromise, they resolved to split the production: filming would be done at Kaufman Astoria Studios, in Queens, with Lisa Vinnecour supervising the actors in Kohan’s stead, while the writers’ room and postproduction would stay in LA with Kohan and Burley. This was an unorthodox choice, separating the showrunner from the show, but it would end up being a huge advantage in terms of access to talent, since many of the women they ultimately cast were New York–based theater actors with little or no TV experience.
Kohan asked Girls casting director Jennifer Euston to help her assemble a large, star-free cast. What the showrunner had in mind for Orange surpassed even the diversity of Shondaland’s shows: a cast composed of women of all racial backgrounds but also all ages and sizes. Rhimes had nudged color consciousness to its limits on network television, but her spot at ABC meant she could push only so far past mainstream ideas of beauty. Jenji wanted to steer Orange into cinema verité territory: having the “Hollywood pretty” Piper character at the show’s center would only accentuate Orange’s realistic depiction of the other women’s bodies.
“Unknowns, all women—and so many minority women? I was like a kid in a candy store!” Euston recalls of the casting process. She had so many favorite actresses who, because of their color, size, age, or unconventional looks, could never get more than bit parts. And here was Kohan, promising possible series-regular roles for these great stage and character actresses.
Euston didn’t have much material to work with for the initial auditions. For the role of an inmate named Taystee, she had just a single line—“You got those TV titties, all nice and perky!” Taystee says admiringly of Piper’s breasts in the shower room—but actress Danielle Brooks exuded a joyfulness that fit the part. Uzo Aduba was on the verge of quitting acting to go to law school when she read for the character of Jenae, a former track star. A runner herself, Aduba arrived for the audition with her hair tied in knots and a white tank top to show off her arms. Kohan later watched the tape and said, “I want Uzo for Crazy Eyes!” Euston was baffled. “I said, ‘Who is Crazy Eyes?’ She wasn’t even in the script at that point. But Jenji took the pool of people that I showed her, and if she liked them, she would just find them a part.”
Although most of the roles went to unknowns, Kohan drafted several familiar faces, such as Kate Mulgrew, Laura Prepon, Taryn Manning, and Jason Biggs. The role of Piper went to Taylor Schilling, who had starred in NBC’s medical series Mercy, and Kohan brought over a few actors she’d worked with on Weeds, including Pablo Schreiber (who would play the creepy corrections officer nicknamed Pornstache), Michael Harney (the slightly less creepy prison counselor Healy), and Natasha Lyonne.
Lyonne was playing a small part on the final season of Weeds when she got a hold of the Orange script and nearly jumped out of her skin with excitement. She quickly started trying to convince Kohan and director Michael Trim that she was a perfect fit for the role of tough-talking, sweet-hearted junkie Nicky Nichols, using her own public struggle with smack as a guarantee of authenticity. “I know you’re thinking, How could this girl have had a tough life?” Lyonne recalls telling Kohan and Trim. “Google it. I have a criminal record to back this show up!” Lyonne, a native New Yorker known for roles in Slums of Beverly Hills and American Pie, worried that the plum part would go to an ethereal twenty-something waif. But her “I’m a junkie, honest!” pitch did the trick.
Sitting in a booth at a Los Angeles diner, Lyonne holds forth in her brassy New York accent, sounding more like a bawdy old Jewish man than the petite thirty-seven-year-old actress she is. Beneath those wide eyes and waves of red hair, Lyonne says she feels a kinship with the kind of hard-veneer 1970s male characters played by Robert De Niro, Harry Dean Stanton, and Gene Hackman. The part of Nicky Nichols, an ever-shifting mix of loyal friend, lesbian lothario, brittle fuckup, and relapsing addict, plays to her strengths.
Like Lyonne, many of the actresses on the show had struggled for years in the business, too oddball to fit the kind of cookie-cutter roles that generally presented themselves. But now, with Orange, they finally had a chance to shine.
“A lot of the women in the show are too distracting in their originality,” Lyonne suggests. “So we are blown away that the secret all along was: Dorothy, be yourself.” She tugs at her white-and-blue-striped sweater as if there’s something crawling inside it, and finally pulls it off, revealing a delicate black lace camisole underneath. “The actresses were all past the time where it was do-or-die for them—they were just over the hump of whatever life horror it was that didn’t break them. So they were willing to bring all that to the table and access it without having it destroy them.”
Laverne Cox is a transgender actress who was performing at the East Village drag bar Lucky Cheng’s when she auditioned to play Sophia Burset. “Laverne is a great example of someone who for sure was bringing aspects of her personal journey,” says Lyonne. Cox embraced the role of Sophia, a former fireman who winds up in prison after engag
ing in credit card fraud to finance her transition. At the time, there had been very few recurring transgender characters on episodic television, and the broader conversation about trans identity and rights hadn’t yet reached mainstream America. (Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman nearly two years after Orange premiered.)
Determined to make Sophia Burset realistic and sympathetic, Sian Heder interviewed a number of transgender people before writing the season-one episode that detailed Sophia’s life before prison. The result was a character who was “kind of selfish in some ways,” not to mention a criminal. Heder was worried about the potential for backlash, she says, “but I think trans people were so relieved to have a three-dimensional person on-screen, warts and all.”
The episode suggests Sophia has escaped the jail of gender only to be incarcerated once again. We catch a glimpse of Sophia’s troubles within the prison system, which declines to pay for the female hormones she needs. And we hark back to her transitioning in the years before she’s sent to Litchfield: trying on tacky girl’s clothes in front of wife Crystal—“You look like Hannah Montana,” Crystal teases—and dealing with a young son who is angry and embarrassed by Sophia’s metamorphosis.
“The big problem with that episode was that we had to have scenes where she used to be a man,” says co-executive producer Lisa Vinnecour. Although Cox was game, the facial hair just didn’t look right on her, so the search began for a male look-alike. “We were really struggling, and then Laverne mentioned, just real casual one day, ‘You know I have a twin brother?’ We had no idea!” So Cox’s twin, M. Lamar, swept in and played the part so well that many viewers didn’t realize they’d used a double.
Less than a year after the show’s premiere, Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine, won a GLAAD Award, and became the first transgender actress nominated for an Emmy. “What’s revolutionary is not that there’s a trans character, or even that a trans character is being played by a trans actor, although that’s a big deal,” Cox told the New York Times in 2014. “But it’s written in such a profoundly human way, so that audiences are connecting with this person that they didn’t expect to connect with.”
That’s true of so many of the inmates, castaways on an Island of Misfit Toys populated by women rarely seen on American TV, unless it’s on reality shows or the news. They are Latina or black or Asian, elderly or sickly, overweight or skeletal, and all of them carry backstories of emotional trouble, or crippling poverty, or sexual abuse, or drug addiction. Out of the pandemonium of clashing personalities and ethnic rivalries, an aria gradually emerges: broken lives converge into a ragged and unruly sort of harmony.
“People are living in more and more insulated worlds, in feedback loops,” Kohan says earnestly. “So if I can introduce something new to familiarize those people with others or the Other, and to help recognize parts of yourself in people you never thought you would, I feel like that is part of my job.”
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A whirlwind of buzz met Orange Is the New Black almost as soon as Netflix made all thirteen episodes available in July 2013. It wasn’t just critics raving. Fans binged and tweeted and Facebooked and Instagrammed and created memes—all those digital modes of expressing enthusiasm and exuberantly arguing about a show’s merits or defects that have become integral to TV viewing in the twenty-first century. The first series to really benefit from Netflix’s approach of releasing all of a show’s episodes at once, Orange depended upon social media as a form of promotion, since it didn’t have weekly time slots around which an audience’s reactions could be synchronized and unified.
The network encouraged interaction with blooper videos and fan art, while the show’s stars offered up pictures of themselves palling around on set and supporting one another’s projects off set. It wasn’t just a publicity ploy, either; many of the actors had grown very close. In order to cultivate intimacy among the sprawling group, Lisa Vinnecour organized outings while shooting the first season. They might walk across the Brooklyn Bridge en masse or go for a drive to visit a haunted house in Connecticut. A few weeks after the first season premiered, Vinnecour invited everyone to her birthday party at a joint in Manhattan’s West Village.
“I started noticing other people surrounding us and whispering and pointing. Next thing you know, there’s a line forty people deep to get in,” Vinnecour says with amazement. “People are calling their friends, saying, ‘Get over here, the cast of Orange Is the New Black is here!’ That was when I realized, ‘Whoa, this show is much bigger than I expected it to be.’ ”
Shooting with such a massive cast (sometimes as many as eighty speaking parts in an episode) is challenging, but it eliminates any possibility that the writers will get bored, because there’s a kaleidoscopic array of personalities to probe. As Kohan promised, Piper acts as a stand-in for the average white upper-middlebrow viewer. She exudes unconscious white privilege from every invisible pore. “I’m gonna read everything on my Amazon wish list and maybe learn a craft!” is how she imagines she will make the most of her jail time, before she actually goes inside. Through Piper’s eyes, we learn the internal politics of this minimum-security prison, where women congregate in tribes based on ethnicity. Guards vacillate between well-meaning ineptitude and sadistic cruelty; earnest prison administrator Joe Caputo spends his downtime playing in a bar band called Side Boob.
The show is structured so that viewers can’t help but see past the khaki prison uniform to the human being inside. Each episode includes flashbacks that focus on a particular character’s backstory, complete with the miseries and misdeeds that set her on the path to incarceration. We glimpse self-possessed Taystee as an orphan who found a mentor in a charismatic neighborhood drug dealer, and learn that tough mother hen Gloria Mendoza (Selenis Leyva) committed food-stamp fraud in order to escape an abusive boyfriend. Often, our preconceptions about the characters are totally upended. In her flashback scenes, for instance, elderly Miss Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat) morphs back into the thrill-seeking sex-bomb bank robber she once was.
Possibly the supreme example of Orange’s trick of flipping the viewer’s assumptions involves the flashback story for Suzanne, the poetic, mentally troubled African American inmate nicknamed Crazy Eyes. Unlike some of the other inmates of color, who emerged from grim poverty and violent homes, Suzanne turns out to have grown up within the pampered security of an upper-middle-class white adoptive family. Sian Heder says this backstory wasn’t at all premeditated: Kohan inserted this detail into one of the scripts on the spur of the moment, detonating a little story bomb. “It was almost like a joke shot: ‘Cut to Crazy Eyes sitting with two white people, calling them Mommy and Daddy.’ But you create one little detail about the character, and it ripples through to the rest of the season. Every writer has to continue to build a world around that idea.”
Kohan had originally asked Jen Euston to fill even the most minor roles with powerful actors, so “if the part got bigger, they could nail it,” says Euston. Indeed, as time went on, characters who lurked in the background for whole seasons moved to center stage, and inmates who initially appeared to be one-dimensional thugs (at least to Piper’s eyes) were given intricate shading. One of those cartoony villains was Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett (Taryn Manning), a squirrelly looking, racist meth addict with lank hair and rotten teeth who’d been arrested for a shooting at an abortion clinic. When antiabortion supporters write her letters in prison, she assures them, “I’ll be out before the Rapture.”
Set up as Piper’s nemesis, she unexpectedly evolves into a thoughtful, sympathetic young woman forged by a childhood of malign neglect. Her mother’s advice that she should passively accept whatever men sexually inflict upon her shapes Doggett’s relationship with a new prison guard, Coates (James McMenamin). He seems like a gentle guy, and their outings in the prison van feel like joyful flirtation, an escape for both of them from their assigned roles as captor and convict. But then the true power imbalance reasserts itself, culminating in a heart
rending rape scene in the van’s backseat. The camera bears witness, staying focused on Pennsatucky’s face as Coates forces himself upon her. Stoically withstanding the attack, just like her mama taught her, Pennsatucky makes no sound. Despite her best efforts to dissociate herself from her body, a single tear escapes from her eye.
“Taryn had been told that her character, because of her past, just shuts down when she gets violated,” Vinnecour recalls of shooting that painful scene. “So she was in shutdown mode, and then one tear came out of her eye—it was perfect. I went over to tell her, ‘That was so beautiful!’ but she just said, ‘I am so sorry. I know I’m not supposed to have an emotion. It just came out!’ ” Vinnecour creates a safety bubble for the actresses that allows them to make themselves vulnerable. That means clearing the set for sensitive sex scenes and keeping an eye on how the women’s bodies look, so they won’t feel self-conscious.
Kohan says, “The biggest problem we have with being graphic [on the show] is actors balking at it. I understand, they are the ones who are vulnerable and who are being freeze-framed and used for masturbation fodder! But I keep trying to push it, because our sexual drives aren’t deviant; they are human.”
At Litchfield, Piper is reunited with her drug-smuggling college girlfriend, Alex (Laura Prepon), and the charged sexual liaisons between these conventionally attractive women (in supply closets and showers) became fantasy fodder for Orange Is the New Black fans of all genders. Sometimes sex is played for laughs, as when butch lesbian Boo (Lea DeLaria) challenges Nicky to see who can seduce the most inmates. Other times, it carries heavy emotional weight, as when Poussey (Samira Wiley) tries to kindle a romantic relationship with her resolutely straight best friend, Taystee. After a failed attempt at a kiss between them, Taystee offers, “Maybe we could cuddle for a minute?” They lie silently spooning, a look of restrained misery on Poussey’s face. And then, of course, there is sex with a power differential, between inmates and jailers, whether forced (as with Doggett) or chosen (as between a young inmate impregnated by a romantic guard). Kohan creates a microcosm of the outside world, with all the tiny pleasures and social horrors played out in captivity.