We’re Not in OZ Anymore

As the title of Salamishah Tillet's review of Orange Is the New Black puts it: “It's so not OZ.” OZ first aired in 1997, around the time that premium cable channels like HBO were first exploring the potential of producing their own scripted original dramas. Much about TV had changed by the time Orange premiered as part of Netflix's own expedition into original programming over a decade later. Unlike OZ or The Wire, which helped to midwife the so-called “New Golden Age” of television, Orange represents one of its more recent and popular exemplars, emerging at a time when streaming upstarts such as Netflix were first becoming heavyweight contenders for market share in TV viewing.

Orange also belongs to a recognizably different historical moment than series like OZ or The Wire. Due in large part to a flurry of works published by academics and activists, including Michelle Alexander's best-selling The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration has become an increasingly urgent topic of public conversation and concern. Even so, Orange remains one of only a few scripted TV dramas which have intimately explored prison life in the contemporary moment of American mass incarceration. Even more remarkably, it chose to focus on women prisoners rather than men.