Remember This White Lady?

Time for some 'Lean In' programming baby

Yes, that’s right. There was in fact a time when people would use ‘Netflix Original’ not to refer to ‘Is It Cake’ S3 but to high quality original programming. And this makes sense. This makes sense when you consider that streaming was still a format that needed to justify itself, as opposed to the implied standard format that it is today. It was once incumbent on Netflix to make the argument for people to drop a hard earned $9.99 on their service.

Leading the charge amongst Netflix’s slate of prestige programming was a show called Orange is the New Black, and it is emblematic of that era in more ways than one. Orange is the New Black, or OITNB, is a good TV show. But more interestingly, it’s a good TV show that came out during a time when the industry of TV was undergoing a phase shift. The choices that Netflix and the show’s creator Jenji Kohan made, as well as the other parties involved in the show, would set the course for the era sometimes referred to as ‘Peak TV’, which followed the so called ‘Golden Age’ of television. For that reason, as well as it’s obvious quality, OITNB should be considered a canonical piece of television. But this piece isn’t just about why OITNB was so impactful, nor about why it was so good. It’s a piece about why it hit so incredibly hard for a show with little in the way of star power or big names, released straight to streaming by a company who, at the time, was an upstart in the industry vying for the attention of the public. To quote a Grantland article from a year after the first season’s launch:

‘Unlike with Cards¹ and Arrested, there were no A-list celebrities to promote, no preexisting fires to stoke. The series had a high concept — preppy blonde is sent to a minimum-security women’s prison — but a remarkably low-key, almost improvisational feel.‘²

Let’s start with the facts. OITNB is a Netflix series which ran from 2013-2019. The show is made up of seven seasons of 13 episodes each. Created by Jenji Kohan and based on the 2010 memoir by Piper Kerman of the same name, OITNB initially draws on the experiences of the book’s author – detailing her year long prison sentence for drug trafficking. The author was sentenced after her ex-girlfriend, having recently been indicted, gives her up for being an accomplice during their relationship ten years prior.

Praise for the show, during its run, was in a word: effusive, and the awards came pouring in from the first season to the last

‘The return of Netflix’s stunning success, ‘Orange Is the New Black’’ (Grantland, 2014)

‘You’ll want to lock the door and throw away the key’ (The Guardian, 2013)

‘Orange Is the New Black’ Taught Us What Netflix Was For (NYT, 2019)

The New York Times would later use Facebook likes as a proxy for a piece of data journalism investigating the regional and demographic trends in TV preferences in 2016. Part of this investigation indicated that OITNB’s viewership skewed towards major urban centers and white audiences, adding credence to the idea that this was definitely a ‘prestige’ show. Beyond being critically adored, it was disproportionately enjoyed in the same places where ‘prestige’ as a social currency tends to reside in America.

This mattered for a company just dipping its toes into TV production (although the production of OITNB was originally handled by Lionsgate, in the public mind it was a ‘Netflix-made’ show). It meant screen time at award shows, and an angle to market their product that went beyond ‘Watch what you want, when you want’. Netflix was now obligatory, if you wanted to be part of the cutting edge of pop-culture.

Despite this, OITNB seems to have all but disappeared from cultural discourse, to the point where the case needs to be made for it to be remembered as one of the canonical shows of TV history. It is not, like Mad Men or Game of Thrones, the perennial subject of youtube video essays. Nor is it, like Succession, a meme darling. For that reason, in addition to figuring out why the show was such a touchstone when it first appeared, I’d like to talk about why we forgot about it so fast.

There’s more to the story of why OITNB is a truly groundbreaking series in the history of the TV format than just the fact that it was among the first streaming shows with clout.

OITNB, making full use of its streaming-native status, chose to release episodes, not one by one on a weekly basis (as was the traditional method of distribution for a series of its kind), but rather to drop an entire new season at once, to be enjoyed at the viewer’s pleasure. This highlighted the difference between streaming and conventional cable, and thus played up Netflix’s value proposition to customers.

It also had a profound effect on how people chose to engage with the medium. It would seem, at least in the short term, that given the option between spacing out episodes week by week, or gorging themselves on 10+ hours of shows in one single sitting (a ‘binge session’ if you will), well, most viewers seemed to opt for the latter. In turn, this new way of watching a series would have knock on effects for the way in which writing would be done for shows going forward.

A traditional TV format requires a structure of storytelling that’s renders each episode both a satisfactory and complete unit with it’s own internal structure, but also leaves enough intrigue and incompleteness in its narrative to encourage audiences to return, and ideally to remember the episode a full week later. This is not necessary if you work under the assumption that your audiences are going to engage with several episodes, or indeed maybe a whole season in one sitting. Thus, rather than resembling a chain of individual links, a season of TV in the streaming era begins to take on the appearance of one long, and at times shapeless, tangle of narrative threads, seemingly arbitrarily chopped up into smaller pieces for easier consumption.

Whether or not you personally enjoy this change in narrative structure, OITNB deserves recognition for its role in pioneering one of the most significant shifts in television writing over the past several years.

Presumably none of these paratextual details about how it was released, how much it cost to make, by whom it was made and so on, would have had the effects that they did on the industry and the medium were it not for the fact that OITNB had audiences and critics alike absolutely gagged. Well, that’s probably true, but I’m still going to bring us back out of text for just one more minute and talk a little bit more about its material context, because I do think that in the case of OITNB in particular, the context in which the show was released was profoundly important to the way in which it was received, and might also contribute to why the show seems to be not as prevalent in today’s cultural landscape.

So yeah, we’re gonna need to talk about the Obama administration.

The premiere of OITNB in 2013 locates it smack dab in the middle of Obama’s eight-year tenure as President of the United States of America (I’m told this is the home of the brave as well as also being the land of the free, so important job).

When he ran for office in 2007, it was on a platform of change, and change the country certainly did during his presidency. To what extent Obama had anything at all to do with that, and whether or not it was change of the kind he promised is another question, but it’s undeniable that the very fabric of American society was in many ways rewoven during Obama’s time in the White House.

To quote an investigation by Pew from 2017, taking stock of his administration only shortly after he had left office: “Profound social, demographic and technological changes have swept across the United States during Obama’s tenure”. For the purposes of this article, it’s the social changes that we’re most interested in.

One of the most notable shifts that occurred under Obama, was a massive drift of the ‘cultural mainstream’ towards a new environment of questioning and making oneself aware of systemic social injustices, or to use the word in it's original non-pejorative sense, before it was appropriated from AAVE and turned into a cudgel against the left, ‘wokeness’.

The same Pew article cites one piece of evidence which I think is particularly relevant in this context. The decriminalization of marijuana. According to Pew “Eight states and the District of Columbia legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, a legal shift accompanied by a striking reversal in public opinion: For the first time on record, a majority of Americans now support legalization of the drug.“ We have to make one thing abundantly clear here, this is not simply an illustrative example of how America experienced a more ‘liberal’ turn under Obama in a broad sense, (i.e. ‘let people do what they want’ Liberal, like capital L Liberal).

Because of the history of race and drug use in America, decriminalisation of marijuana carries incredibly large symbolic power, in addition to its material consequences. Simply because of how the American state/media complex had spent innumerable resources over the preceeding four decades to interlink the two ideas of drugs and race.

To explain this, we need to talk about ‘the war on drugs’, how it started, and why.

It’s own architects have freely admitted that the intention of the war on drugs was to establish a way for the political class of America to crack down on countercultural elements and black communities without explicitly profiling people based on race or political affiliation.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people,

You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,

We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”³

These quotes are from John Ehrlichman, the domestic policy chief for Nixon. This is straight from the source, the highest echelons of American power admitting in plain English that the war on drugs was always intended, first and foremost, to be a way of weaponising the state apparatus against minority groups and political enemies, and to generate consent.

It was, in effect, an effort at walking back the concessions they had been forced to make by the civil rights movement. Linking marijuana to hippies, and heroin and later crack to black people, the government could effectively declare war on these groups under the guise of a far more palattable ‘war on drugs’. In this sense, the sweeping changes to drug laws which occured during the Obama administration can be understood to be not only reflective of changing attitudes towards recreational drug use and civil liberties broadly in the US, but also a specific reflection of the increased political power of black and progressive communities and groups. If the ‘war on drugs’ was a war on hippies and black people, then these policy changes were, at least publically (US prisons are still full of black citizens serving time for drug related offenses because of draconian sentencing during the ‘war on drugs’) a declaration of ‘peace’ between the U.S. state aparatus and both progressives and black people.

But situating the show in its political and cultural context involves more than looking at polling data and public policy. The type of media that was at the center of a still largely intact monocultural (if fracturing) mechanism of delivery also tells something of the milieu in which OITNB first emerged. In 2013, Beyoncé headlined the Super Bowl halftime show, perhaps one of the most politically charged stages an artist can occupy in America. Later that same year she would release her self titled album, which put intersectional feminist messaging front and center, notably incorporating a voiceover by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie. Hardly the first time a major American artist had chosen to make a political statement, but in the context of the preceeding 15 or so years, it was very significant that arguably the biggest popstar in America had chosen to make an album so excplicity, undeniably and deliberately advocating for women’s empowerment. Her self titled album is notable also for its foregrounding of trap as a musical aesthetic, a genre that was already in its ascendancy in 2013 and which, over the next few years, would go on to dominate the American musical mainstream. Migos, Cardi, Future and Young Thug would be household names by the end of the decade and white artists were clamoring for a chance to vampirically suck out some of the vitality of the genre in order to sustain their own careers. The album largely presages that development as well as laying some of the groundwork for broadening the appeal of this style of music to ‘middle America’.

This is the same year Kanye West released his album Yeezus which he promoted on SNL, another centrist pillar of American culture. One of the album’s lead singles ‘New Slaves’ makes no attempt to mask its anti prison-industrial complex message:

‘Meanwhile the DEA teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock n****s up, they tryna make new slaves
See, that’s that privately owned prison, get your piece today’

This was also only two years before the Supreme Court ruling which upheld the right to gay marriage in all states.

Suffice it to say that ‘wokeness’ (again, in its original sense) was in the air. Reformism, and the idea that America was ready to become a more egalitarian, diverse nation which could be honest about its historical and present injustices seemed to be everywhere in the media.

The millennial vicegrip on culture feels like it really began to solidify in this period, and with that, the cultural spirit, ‘zeitgeist’ if you want to be all German about it, was defined by what I think was maybe an underrated part of the Millennial ethos, a relentless conviction in the arc of history bending towards progress. Yes, I know now we mainly associate ‘Millennials’ with the cultural kitsch they left in their wake. To me they’re the Target generation. Rainbow capitalism was midwifed into the world by these people who trusted that there were ‘good corporations’ and that upholding their bottom line by buying a polyester t-shirt that says some variant of ‘I LOVE MY GAY SON’ was in itself an act of social justice. ‘Cheugy’ as they were, enraptured with manbuns, sans serif fonts and brand collabs (?) I do think that one of the reasons that they seem irksome to some, is that this conviction may at times have led to complacency. A trust in politicians who presented as progressive whilst upholding a system of economic exloitaton, in corporations who feigned interest in anything other than rents and in ‘big tech’ as a mechanism of liberation and not control.

But frankly, I’m not convinced that the instinct that society will inevitably become more just is one we should condemn them for, even if it was perhaps used to dupe them. All this is to say, that the cultural environment in which OITNB first premiered, as a show made up almost entirely of women of a variety of different ages, ethnicities, socio-cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations, one which made its mission to critique and question the intersections of race, gender and state power in America, was primed to be an enormous hit. It was a show that rose to meet its moment.

OITNB was a show that hit at just the right time, this made it incredibly popular in the short term but might have inhibited its medium term staying power. Being incredibly timely also means that it is incredibly asosciated with a particular time, one which is undergoing a critical reevaluation and is not yet distant enough for most Americans to be nostalgic about it.

This entire period, not only in the US, but in western Europe, too, which often floats behind in the wake of American policy, is currently being revised in the collective imagination as perhaps not the dawn of a new era of progressivism, but a time of almost childish passivity and lack of forward thinking.

This is the time when Angela Merkel, decided it was a good idea to conspire with union leaders and industrial titans to artificially supress wages and import vast quantities of Russian LNG in order to preserve Germany’s industrial competitiveness at the cost of investment in green energy and geopolitical stability.

It was a time of mass deportations, mass drone warfare by the US and the continuing slide into relative poverty of enormous swathes of the American populace that were decidedly not streaming OITNB, they were streaming Duck Dynasty.

Those Americans, not the white liberal powerbrokers who ran culture, or atleast purported to, are the subject of the conversation now.

It was very apparent in putting together this post is that by and large, despite its contemporary prominence, the internet has largely left this show behind. That is to say, there is very little ‘content’ (YouTube video essays, Substack posts, Tumblr posts, Viral Twitter threads what have you) about the show produced after it came off the air. This largely tallies with what I expected since in my own personal experience, it’s not a show that ‘people’ ‘talk about’. That’s in direct contrast to other prestige TV from the modern era (00’s/10’s) a lot of which is continuously re-litigated, and turned over by the discourse machine in the hunt for new angles from which to understand it. OITNB by contrast seems to have been a far more one-and-done phenomenon. The show succeeds on its own merits, of course, and none of this would be as relevant if it weren’t also a very good TV show with wonderful performances and a tight script. People watched it, for sure. People enjoyed it. People even had things to say about it, when they watched it. And then it seems like people kind of left it alone once they were done.

I do not think, however, that this means that OITNB was actually forgotten. If anything it is perhaps a show that urges us to rethink the ways in which we define cultural relevance. What has more of an impact on ‘culture’, the show that is clipped, comped and memed to pieces, present everywhere on the sites people claim to want to get off but can’t seem to leave, or the one that rewired the very way we watch, who we watch, and which has come to be indelibly assosciated with a period which spawned so many of the discursive fissures that now threaten to spread and become irreconcilable rifts?

Should the quietness of its impact its status as a ‘canonical’ work of TV? In my opinion, no, because while I do think that an essential function of a ‘canon’ is to set apart those works which were particular not only in quality but also in influence, I do not think influence needs to be commented on, indeed even recognised to be real. The fact that OITNB hasn’t (yet) become a ‘topic’ doesn’t necessarily have any breaing on the extent to which it factors into the lay of the modern TV landscape.

1. House of Cards and Arrested Development.

2. https://grantland.com/features/orange-is-the-new-black-netflix-season-two/.

3. https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.