- Poniewozik's review for Time.comOverall, Schilling's performance is a thing of beauty. And so is this show. Kohan and her team have pulled off a neat trick here -- a highly distinctive piece of television that has both lightness and depth.
The show becomes more engrossing as is spins out from her story, fleshing out the inmates, their backstories, and their alliances. You may come for the culture-clash cringe-comedy; its the real human stories that will have you captivated.
- Metro.uk: Jason Biggs: Orange Is The New Black finds humour in the grimmest of situationsDont let the flippant title fool you: Orange is scary, smart and relevant, and it will make you wonder why no one thought to give the Oz formula a dose of estrogen before now.
At every turn, Orange Is The New Black is filled with richly portrayed, complicated characters, of all races and creeds, and the show takes both their crimes and their desire for atonement seriously.
Grade: A-
"Orange Is the New Black" is not, as the counselor notes to Piper, the next "Oz." There's the occasional threat of violence, but the series is much more interested in how a group of women from a variety of racial and socio-economic backgrounds try or fail to connect when placed in the same enclosed space for months or years on end. But it evokes "Oz" in a very, very good way: it doesn't feel quite like anything that's been put on television (if we're still calling Netflix "television") before. I had no plans for this series beyond the couple of episodes I expected to watch before writing this review. Now, I can't wait to find time to watch the rest of this first season.
Piper Kerman, the real-life figure behind the new Netflix Original Series "Orange Is The New Black", joins us to share her true story about life in a women's prison.
"Orange" is a scrappy, entertaining, low-budget program that doesn't try to be a Serious Drama, but instead uses the cover of a well-known genre to explore bracing and challenging places.
Looks like Hemlock Grove and Lilyhammer were just minor missteps.
Orange may be a roughly hourlong show, but it has the soul of a sitcom or a teen drama its more Gossip Girl than Oz and situations tend to resolve themselves through slightly over-the-top humor and an increasingly prevalent sentimentality.
- Newsday: Orange is the new 'blah'What you get from Jenji Kohan's (Weeds) unexpectedly affecting new 13-episode series is a true rarity: a deft mix of comedy and drama in which the prison feels like a real place and the women are actual people, rather than a thinly veiled excuse to stage catfights, lesbian fantasies and sexual assault.
- LA Times Review: Lock yourself up with 'Orange Is the New Black'"Orange" is also a comedy that wants to be a drama -- especially one that humanizes those around Chapman. It's a balancing act that occasionally -- far too occasionally -- works. Grade: C-
Jenji Kohan's fine and feisty adaptation of Piper Kerman's memoir, which chronicled Kerman's yearlong stint in federal prison, may not have the star power of "House of Cards." But a women's prison is certainly a fresher landscape than power-mad D.C. And the distance between the frenzied expectations of "Arrested Development" and its very mixed reception clears a nice space for a comedy that is a deceptively ambitious mix of the innovative and the dependable.
But Orange promises to be a better and more expansive show [than Weeds], at least based on the first four episodes, as it explores not only the fish-out-of-water story of the WASPy-looking Piper in a mixed socioeconomic and racial world, but the personalities of her prison mates. Each hourlong episode moves forward with Pipers Martha Stewart-like efforts to survive as well as backward, to explain who all these people are and how they landed in jail. These characters arent just types; each of them, even the least appealing, slowly becomes three-dimensional.
The mix of colorful, over-the-top characters and serious situations can sometimes result in tonal inconsistency, but the bold, creative and occasionally messy Orange is preferable to any number of dreary, by-the-numbers premium cable (and Netflix) dramas.
Yup, anything from S1 is fair game.Free reign on spoilers in here correct?
the OP said:On SpoilersBecause all of the first season episodes are going to be up at the same time, this thread will not use any spoiler tags for S1 content. Again, once the episodes are up simultaneously on July 11th, spoilers are fair game. If you don't want to be spoiled, please stay out of the thread until you're finished.
Is this online yet? If Jenji Kohan is back to her Weeds season 1-3 quality then I'm in.
EDIT: reviews are looking gooooood. I'm excited
Just to let others know but there is nudity within the first 30 seconds of the premiere. A heads up.
Didn't a expect a GoT post in here lol
Is this online yet? If Jenji Kohan is back to her Weeds season 1-3 quality then I'm in.
EDIT: reviews are looking gooooood. I'm excited
This is up now. Laura Prepon breasts in the first ten seconds. I'm still in shock.
This is up now. Laura Prepon breasts in the first ten seconds. I'm still in shock.