I just want to chime in here and say that OiTNB’s 1st season, when taken as a whole, has a pretty clear journey that it takes the viewer on w/r/t Piper so that by the end it’s a subversion of the middle class white girl wandering in a forest of otherness tropes. It assumes that the viewer will view Piper as a surrogate and uses this to cunning effect. Piper is overtly shown to be a monster by the end of season 1, and that monstrosity is meant to be back-read into the series as a whole. it’s kind of like how with GIRLS the pilot makes you think you’re supposed to have a certain level of sympathy for Hannah, but that’s just the show’s entry point, you have a completely different understanding of her by the end of the first season. The lost little middle class white girl schtick is part of Piper’s monstrousness. It helps if you keep in mind that her entire life pre prison is a lie, it’s a performance that she’s bought into, but because the show starts with that performance, it takes a while to develop the aspects of her that don’t fit into it (that this comes with developing the non-middle-class non-white and non-hetereosexual characters is no coincidence). The show is very much about lies (including delusions) performance and identity. And it performs as a fish out of water dramedy for the first half for a reason.
Part of what makes OITNB exciting is that it takes its viewer on this kind of arc which is– assuming you start with sympathy for Piper, as many clearly did– meant to be at least somewhat indicting of the audience. The Lost Middle Class White Girl schtick is revealed as a schtick by the end of season one, as part of Piper’s monstrosity, much as Hannah’s narcissism makes her a monster. Both shows go to some lengths to point this out by the end of their first seasons.