by Joy Press
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Vaginas come up as a topic in the writers’ room “approximately 62 times a day,” Orange writer Lauren Morelli has written—“much to the chagrin” of the staff’s handful of male writers. Unlike Weeds’s mostly masculine lineup, Orange’s room was female-dominated from the start.
Kohan coaxed the writers to share the intimate details of their lives, and Morelli realized, while writing about and discussing Piper’s sexuality in season one, that she herself was gay. “In Piper and Alex, I’d found a mouthpiece for my own desires and a glimmer of what my future could look like,” she wrote in a 2015 essay for Mic. She left her husband and began a relationship with one of the show’s stars, Samira “Poussey” Wiley. In 2017, the two women got married.
Working on a show with not just a mostly female cast but also a mostly female crew was a disorienting and novel experience for many involved. “I really had to abandon this idea I had that I’m the kind of girl that doesn’t really get along with girls,” Natasha Lyonne says, laughing. “It’s a very interesting case study, because there are so many of us and we’re all different, and yet there is enough space for all of us.” Lisa Vinnecour similarly marvels at Orange’s unprecedented femaleness: “You look around, and the amount of women sitting on set at any given moment, on camera and off—it’s epic.” She recalls looking around Video Village at a certain point during the production of season four: “Every single person—hair, makeup, wardrobe, lighting, script—was a woman.”
Yet imbalances persist. One enduring sore point for Kohan is pay disparities in the entertainment industry, with men at the same level of their careers as she is earning significantly more. “I am sick of not getting paid as much as I think I should’ve been for many, many years—particularly on Weeds,” Kohan tells me. “It was just embarrassing, and it remains a thorn in my side.” The only recourse for women, she says, is threatening to walk and being prepared to follow through, as Amy Sherman-Palladino unsuccessfully did on Gilmore Girls. “Ultimately, it comes down to: Are you willing to kill the baby? Maybe it’s harder for women to do that, but it’s really the only power you have.”
Kohan admits that she has often chosen creative license over money. With Orange, that meant the luxury to conjure up a cornucopia of female characters, probably employing more women of color in major speaking roles than all the non-Shondaland network prime-time shows combined. That was evident when the enormous ensemble gathered onstage to collectively accept their 2015 Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble: crowded around Uzo Aduba, who gripped the statuette, was a collection of women right out of a “United Colors of Benetton” ad, beaming and hugging one another in disbelief.
Yet the show’s treatment of race set off alarm bells for some critics. In the Nation, Aura Bogado argued that Orange was just the latest instance of white people exploiting the suffering of African Americans. Putting Piper and her white-girl problems at the center of the first season didn’t help shore up the show’s racial dynamics. Over the following seasons, though, Kohan and her writers opened up the Orange universe: racial caricatures often deepened into compelling characters who wielded stereotypical behavior mostly as a shield or a taunt. Black Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore), for example, starts out as a sassy quip machine, but by the third season, she’s an idiosyncratic wonder. What started as a passing joke about being Jewish (so she can get the better-quality kosher food in the cafeteria) grows serious as she begins to study Judaism in order to convince the prison rabbi she is sincere. The religion’s constant self-reflection appeals to her: “If you do something wrong, you got to figure it out yourself. And as far as God’s concerned, it’s your job to keep asking questions and to keep learning and to keep arguing.” She cries when the rabbi agrees to her conversion. The final step, a mikvah (a ritual immersion in water), is completed during a spontaneous prison break after inmates notice a gap in the fence. Cindy jumps into the forbidden lake outside the prison and, for a moment, floats blissfully.
The tone of the series has grown bleaker over the years. In season one, “there were moments that felt too light, too frivolous,” says writer Sian Heder, as if the women were bunkmates at summer camp. “Often, I would write a super-intense scene, and Jenji would write what she called a funny ‘treacle cutter’ at the end of it. And at first, I was like, ‘God, we can’t just let anything land without a joke?’ But what it gave us was the idea that there is no moment so intense that you can’t laugh in that moment, truly.”
Increasingly, Orange has interspersed that humor with glimpses of the oppressive machinery behind the prison industrial complex. Most of the women at Litchfield committed relatively minor crimes out of desperation, habit, or foolishness, yet the prison embroils inmates in bullshit schemes, such as a mock job fair, rather than actually training them or helping them get work that pays a living wage when they return to the outside world. Things grow more harrowing still when Litchfield’s management is taken over by a private corporation called MCC, whose sole interest is in making money. The new regime of cost cutting and profit making results in dangerous overcrowding; an influx of brutal, barely trained guards; and a general breakdown in the fabric of prison life. As one inmate notes, “We ain’t people now; we bulk items.”
Kohan couldn’t resist having a little fun with the situation, sending Caputo to CorrectiCon, a dystopian prison-management convention featuring panels with titles such as “Shanks for the Memories: A History of Prison Weapons.” But, in season four, that satire was set against a dire, serious portrait of disintegrating prison conditions. Sophia is thrown into the chasm of solitary confinement, aka the SHU, for her own “protection.” Litchfield’s racial factions, which coexisted somewhat peacefully in previous seasons, grow treacherously polarized (and more broadly drawn) as a new population of hardened prisoners pours into the prison. Piper, who has developed a black-market business selling aromatically infused panties worn by her fellow convicts, allies herself with a newly arrived bunch of neo-Nazi women to shore up her power against competition from a rival Dominican gang. After she rats on the Dominicans to prison guards, they retaliate by branding her arm with a swastika.
“The animals, the animals / trapped trapped trapped till the cage is full”—that’s how every episode of Orange opens, with Regina Spektor’s propulsive theme song. In the season-four episode that takes “The Animals” as its title—directed by Kohan’s friend, Mad Men creator Matt Weiner—the inmates stage a nonviolent but chaotic protest in the prison’s canteen against Litchfield’s increasingly inhumane policies. The implicit message is “We are not animals.” But the canteen becomes a killing floor when Poussey, one of Orange’s most beloved personalities, perishes at the hands of a poorly trained, panicked corrections officer.
“I can’t breathe” are her last words, a deliberate echo of those of Eric Garner, whose death at the hands of police helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. The guards leave her corpse lying for hours in the cafeteria—just as the Ferguson police did with Michael Brown after he was shot down in the street—while they pull together a cover story. Speaking to the press, Caputo treats the death as a generic occurrence. Taystee, incandescent with grief and rage, shouts, “They didn’t even say her name!”—a rallying cry in the aftermath of Sandra Bland’s unexplained death in a jail cell.
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Fractious debates had erupted in the writers’ room about which character should die. Kohan felt strongly that they needed to choose Poussey precisely because she was such an endearing, sensitive, and optimistic figure: “She had a future, she had potential, and that is going to be more devastating than losing other characters.” Natasha Lyonne compared the epic nature of filming that scene to Spartacus, such was the intense coordination and rehearsal required. The entire cast was on set, a massive ensemble simulating chaos. “It has to feel like . . . it’s an accident,” Matt Weiner pointed out to Vanity Fair. “But, of course, the whole story of the episode is that nothing is an accident. This entire environment has b
een created because of the corporatization of the prison.”
Actress Samira Wiley ran around between takes trying to cheer up castmates traumatized by her brutal on-screen demise. After the fourth season premiered in June 2016, many equally distraught fans protested with the hashtag #PousseyDeservedBetter. “Disgusting how you could do this to the one beautiful, strong and (finally) happy black lesbian character,” one fan complained on Twitter. Others were disturbed by the show’s decision to include a sympathetic flashback for the young white corrections officer who killed Poussey, a move that seemed to diminish the guard’s culpability for this senseless death.
“There’s something too facile about ‘The evil guard kills the good prisoner,’ ” Kohan argues. “It’s messier than that. They are all people, and they are all making mistakes and acting in the moment. There’s that tension of: Are you the actions you commit? Are you separate from those? I don’t want the easy way out. I want people to struggle with the material and argue with it and be affected by it.”
Wiley herself told reporters she felt proud to contribute to this consciousness-raising moment: “Some people who love Orange Is the New Black don’t know what Black Lives Matter is. They don’t have a black friend and they don’t have a gay friend, but they know Poussey from TV and they feel just like you said—you feel like you knew her.” In a conversation about the show at the political website ThinkProgress, criminal-justice reporter Carimah Townes argued that the season’s narrative was ultimately deeply resonant: “This is the black women’s ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains’ moment. And the story line is so timely. There are prison protests (labor and hunger strikes) happening all over the country, with people saying, ‘Enough is enough’ with slave labor, solitary confinement, and inhumane living conditions.”
Kohan is well aware that Orange offers her a privileged cultural perch. “A huge part of my goal for the show is to start conversations about things,” she told a live audience in 2014. “It is, to a certain extent, my soapbox—I’m not secretive about my political agenda. It’s great that the themes of the show have entered the national conversation and international conversation, and that people are talking about issues that they were never talking about before, and seeing the prison industrial complex in a different light and seeing prisoners in a different light.”
The private penitentiary industry flourished in the early years of the twenty-first century, but there were signs of shifting attitudes. Hillary Clinton had called for an end to the for-profit prison sector, and in August 2016, two months after season four of Orange premiered, President Obama’s Justice Department announced that it would begin phasing out its contracts with corporate prisons. A month later, one of the largest jail strikes in US history erupted all across the country: at least twenty thousand inmates from twenty-three states refused to report for their prison jobs, which paid them little or nothing. “A call to action against slavery in America,” the organizers dubbed the strike, whose demands included fair pay, improved living conditions, and better educational opportunities.
“People are realizing that, okay, we might have made a bit of a mistake here with the war on drugs, that it was really a war on people,” says executive producer Mark Burley. “Mass incarceration is now seen as a failure and an expensive one at that . . . and it doesn’t hurt that people are watching a television show that humanizes those people.” Just as Weeds might have helped changed attitudes toward legalizing marijuana a bit, Orange humanized the prison population—though, with the election of Donald Trump, federal policy on marijuana prosecution and private prisons is moving violently in reverse, back to the bad old days of “just say no” and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Struggling to think of a television series with comparable ambition and breadth, Natasha Lyonne settles on The Wire. David Simon’s show circled Baltimore, stealthily building a stratum-by-stratum geological mapping of an urban landscape of corruption and inequality, tracing the economic pressure points and social fissures that have created an effectively symbiotic arrangement in which drug gangs and police forces have an interest in things staying the same. Crack-empire kingpins, young street dealers, cops, politicians, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and even journalists and teachers—all are implicated in a system that perpetuates itself even as it keeps on failing.
“The scope keeps growing, and suddenly you’re telling me the entire story of the universe of drugs and the impact that it has,” Lyonne says of The Wire. “It feels like that is what is happening with our show.” Orange weaves together the stories of individual women with the systemic dysfunction of the prison industrial complex, the justice system, and society’s frayed safety net. “We are starting to flesh it all out and see the entire story of what it’s like being in prison.”
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The writers’ room of Orange Is the New Black feels like preschool, stocked with toys (clay, coloring books, puzzles) so that people can keep their bodies and brains engaged, even when they’re delving into uncomfortable emotional territory. It’s not easy to keep dozens of narrative threads in motion, and Kohan uses a delicate balance of collaboration and discipline to keep things heading in the right direction. “There is a control freak side to me,” she says, laughing. “I’m not trying to change things just to pee in the corner but to keep the tone of the show constant.”
Stephen Falk, who went on to create the series You’re the Worst after working on both Weeds and Orange, declares Kohan to be the bravest storyteller he knows. “She has no fear of putting the most dramatic thing up against the most comedic. That’s a lesson I have taken from her and used to fortify my timid little heart when I get nervous about doing something.” The two take frequent walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir, during which he continues to absorb her advice and admire the way she speaks truth to Hollywood power. “By being very unafraid to stand her ground, she can sometimes put executives off balance. She is unafraid to piss off the powers that be”—or to burn down the town, for that matter.
In Weeds, Kohan set out to create a mesmerizing woman who could stand alongside Tony Soprano. With Orange, she went one step further: In a show with no fixed center, men are mostly pushed to the margins. It’s the women who take up emotional space within the walls of Litchfield. Joy, misery, humor, rage, jealousy, mischief, lust—nearly all of it is aimed at and reciprocated by other female characters, in defiance of or to evade the men who would restrain them. All that matters is women talking and laughing and telling one another stories.
Kohan says she approached Weeds with the old sitcom attitude that people don’t change: “There is no growth or epiphanies. On Weeds, everyone just becomes more and more of who they are.” On Orange Is the New Black, though, a completely different mind-set was required. In this least promising of environments, characters grow emotionally and forge unexpected alliances across seemingly unbridgeable chasms of race and class and sexuality. Human potential flowers against all odds.
“These women in prison, as a group—they are just lumped together and charged and treated accordingly,” Kohan says. “It was a real opportunity to say, ‘Take another look! There is more to this person than what crime they committed.’ The more you dig, the more you find. So we just keep digging.”
CHAPTER 9
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Body Politic:
Jill Soloway’s Transparent
Jill Soloway confers with Jeffrey Tambor (as Maura) and the cast of Transparent.
Stepping inside Paramount Soundstage 14 is like landing on an alien planet that has painstakingly reconstructed twenty-first-century upper-middle-class life in Los Angeles.
Under sky-high ceilings sprouting massive shiny silver ducts, I walk through a maze of corridors lined with furnished rooms seemingly transported wholesale from elsewhere in LA. Down one hallway is a perfect simulacrum of a Jewish community center meeting room, complete with dilapidated carpet, ceiling tiles mottled with water stains, and tossed-aside menorahs. A few twists and turns down a claustroph
obic tunnel, and I am inside a dark bedroom swathed in velvet fabric, cluttered with carefully chosen beauty products and family photos that reveal this to be the inner sanctum of Davina, a character who serves as a spirit guide for Maura Pfefferman, the trans parent of Jill Soloway’s Transparent. Launched in the fall of 2014, the show won five Emmys that first year for its depiction of a family transforming along with its patriarch.
An unmarked door in a giant wall is the gateway to Pfefferlandia. I emerge into a thicket of trees that surrounds the façade of the Pfefferman family’s modernist house. The kitchen looks ready to entertain, complete with a fresh Trader Joe’s baguette and an array of cheeses. The cast and crew of the show spill out from the kitchen and onto the terrace. They are listening intently to a small figure at the center of the room, show creator Jill Soloway, as she discusses the scene they are about to shoot: a birthday party for Maura that will bring together nearly every character in the series. Judith Light, who plays Maura’s ex-wife, Shelly, tries out dialogue about her character’s new obsession with Twitter (her handle is @ToShellandBack). “I am coming out—as a brand!” she roars tipsily in character, and the crew laughs with her.
While the actors shuffle off to get into costume, Soloway ambles over to the cluster of seats and video monitors just outside the dining room windows, hanging her red baseball cap on the side of her canvas chair. She’s directing this season-three episode, “To Sardines and Back,” which she cowrote with her older sister, Faith, a member of the show’s writing staff. “It’s a little more of a frivolous episode for us,” says Faith, relaxed in her dark hoodie, wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail. “But it is one with a serious revelation, which is that this is when Maura tells her family she wants to have [gender confirmation] surgery.” The “sardines” of the episode title is a real game that Faith says the Soloways played when they were kids, an inversion of hide-and-seek, in which everyone ends up crammed together in a hiding space.