Orange is the New Black, Tit Punch, Review
Every sentence may not tell a story on Orange is the New Black, but flashbacks are probably telling us a lot more than we realize.
Netflix apparently has enough dough to bankroll a handful of series with marquee names like Spacey, Hurwitz and Kohan and aggressively market their products in every corner of the Internet. Not to mention the subway, bus platform, newspaper and billboard ads. And who can fault them? They had the creative talent, the stars and the will to push the limits of what online TV or whatever you want to call it could be.
The plan for Spacey’s House of Cards was to put his face front and center in the advertising campaign. Let his star power speak to Netflix’s promise of desirable original content. Arrested Development was easy. It was the comeback of all comebacks. Again, they slapped Will Arnett’s face on a few posters and need we say more? The king had returned.
Orange is the New Black has been marketed just as heavily but without that key face. They decided to make the marketing campaign a little more subdued. The line we saw in ads seemed like it fit in more with Arrested Development: “Every sentence is a story.”
As the second episode, “Tit Punch,” begins, we really get a sense of how much story there is to tell. In the pilot, Piper makes the cardinal sin of unknowingly insulting the chef. It triggers this mini-rivalry between Red, an older Russian chef, and Piper, who is starting to feel like an outcast on her second day in the joint.
From the first two episodes, there’s a feeling that Piper is never going to be the one who starts a fight. If I end up eating those words six episodes from now, so be it. Piper could be that character that surprises you at times but so far she’s been fairly predictable. In Piper’s attempt to apologize to Red, she comes off as genuine only to find out that sincerity is lost on people who always have their guard up.
Red tells Piper “the second you’re perceived as weak you already are.” Knowing she’ll have to fight but she can’t do it, Piper confronts Red in the kitchen telling her to get it over with and hit her. Here we start to see how a women’s prison isn’t all that different from life on the outside. Instead of clocking Piper, Red chooses to verbally scold the downtrodden blonde. All of a sudden, the prison becomes this grade school lunchroom, where there’s a war of words within different circles and the outcast is trying to find the right place to sit, looking for someone, anyone to confide in.
Piper almost has to get creative to survive. The fact that she read books to try and measure what life in prison was like and eventually won Red’s respect by whipping together a back cream out of makeshift ingredients shows us that there is some fight in her, just maybe not in the traditional sense.
Anyway, back to every sentence being a story. In Arrested Development, literally every line was either a throwback, a reference to a future joke or plot twist, or an inside joke that probably only the show’s writers will ever understand or think is funny. To a lesser extent, there is something similar in OITNB, but it’s a little more direct and accessible. To get the full AD experience, you need a vast knowledge of the wider AD culture for the full effect of Mitch Hurwitz’s creation.
In the episode’s intro, we are given the first backstory for a character other than Piper. Way before she was cooking up something delicious in the prison kitchen, Red was involved with some real housewives of the Russian mafia. She’s a stern woman in the prison but in the flashbacks we see someone who was easily pushed around but was able to forge this new identity after she was sent away.
Slowly, OITNB is giving us these juicy details of how each character got into prison. There’s still more to come of Red’s story, which is exciting. OITNB gives you just a taste of each character – enough where you start to really wonder what makes them tick. As great as Piper is, the show doesn’t need that one singular character to be its heart and soul. Every sentence might not be a story, but the ones we’ve gotten so far have me craving more.
Best of the Rest:
Piper begs Larry to not watch Mad Men so they could binge watch it when she gets out of prison. I call foul. Subliminal messaging! Hello FCC, did you hear that?
“Thank god I got cancer. No one fucks with cancer.”
Den of Geek Rating: 3.5 Out of 5 Stars
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Chris Longo is the Director of Editorial and Partnerships for Den of Geek. He produces special live events and screenings, and oversees production of the Den…