Orange is the New Black and Breaking Bad: In what’s becoming the running theme of a blog post that’s running far too long, I’d rather talk around OITNB than dissect it, though not necessarily by choice this time. Based on the book of the same title, and adapted for television by Weeds creator Jenji Kohan, Orange is the New Black has been a cumbersome title on many tongues lately, providing 2013 its biggest sleeper hit. For all the chatter Netflix generated by stepping into the original content business with a prestige drama in one hand (House of Cards), and a loveable charity case in the other (Arrested Development), seemingly little attention was paid to OITNB in the runup to its release. Some, including myself, only first heard about the show when Netflix announced a second season* had been commissioned only weeks before the entirety of the first came tumbling out all at once.
*The point of such a public show of confidence before a single minute of the show has seen the light of day is just that. The hope is to have people assume that if the show is good enough for the suits, it’s good enough for me. While the tactic may have helped OITNB’s ratings, it wouldn’t be the first show to get the lone, premature renewal notice.
To get this out of the way, let me just add my voice to others joined in the hosanna signing, and say Orange is the New Black is unquestionably one of the best new shows in a year that’s delivered about as many great freshman programs, as returning favorites. The more I look at the nominees for my Top 20 list of the year, the more happy I am to see an increasing percentage of which include “Ladies Getting Shit Done” as a core element of the storytelling. Orange probably features the most Ladies getting the most Shit Done, without necessarily being all that plot-driven. There’s no real A-plot beyond the basic premise of a quietly obnoxious yuppie New Yorker finding herself incarcerated, having been convicted at the 11th hour of the statute of limitations on her party girl/drug mule phase of youth. Relative newbie Taylor Schilling stars as Piper Chapman (a loose version of the book’s ex-con author, Piper Kerman), but the show quickly, and wisely moves away from its fixation on her as a Netflix-using audience surrogate, and shifts focus to many of the other inhabitants of Litchfield Prison.
Piper’s job is to introduce the viewer to the inner workings and population of an environment most won’t be familiar with, and then let those new characters and dynamics tell the real stories. Nearly all of them turn out to be richly compelling and empathetic. It’s tempting to simply throw praise at the show’s feet for having a gender, racial, and sexual balance of characters that’s refreshingly skewed compared to the mean and mode of the television medium. But that diversity would be meaningless if OITNB didn’t go about integrating the unique perspectives that diversity enables into its greater narrative, which it does. And even more so than Broadchurch, by moving the viewer out of a singular headspace, and conflict, Orange is the New Black develops a resonant harmony out of its varied characters, their relationships, and individual histories. The show never loses touch with the basic humanity of its players, who self-identify, and are subsequently identified by others, across wide-ranging, sometimes conflicting conceptions of strength, weakness, limits, and worth.
All of which is a loosey-goosey, emotionally based way of giving my recommendation for the show, something I prefer not to lean on, in favor of direct examples. And sure, select stories and beats stuck with me in particular*, but the more I think about Orange is the New Black, the more the generalities stick out, rather than the specifics. The feel of the show is still etched into my head, but trying to break the broadstrokes memories down into their component parts has proven an unexpected challenge. I mean, I watched the whole thing only a month ago; how can something you’ve enjoyed so much, and so recently, be so damned hard to remember not long after? I feel like a freshman describing his first epic college party weeks after the fact, with hazy memories drifting away due to the passage of time –and because the only thing he can be certain of is that the good time began with copious binge drinking.
*The fifth episode centers around Piper chasing a 10-pound, clucking and flapping metaphor for adjustment to prison life. It speaks to the show’s charms that it can make such an obvious device unexpectedly endearing.
If one word wormed its way into the popular TV lexicon this year, it was definitely that, “binge,” an encapsulation of new viewing methods that’s been so overused of late, exposure to it makes you feel a bit like horking. Yet, the word’s usual partner, purge, isn’t found in the conversation nearly as often, despite it crudely describing the aftereffects I felt after blowing through both House of Cards and Orange is the New Black in a weekend each. Looking beyond Netflix, the ease of access to quality television has never been so trifling, just as the volume of great television has never been so overwhelming. Streaming, DVDs, and pirating now leave no excuse for you not to watch the next episode of a show, wanting to do so immediately quickly becoming the telltale sign of a worthwhile program. Watching a show is coming more to resemble the pace of competitive eating, as we desperately try to shovel down as much content as we can, as quickly as we can, all while ignoring how our haste doesn’t allow for proper digestion.
Confession time: I suck at reading books. Not in terms of literacy, understanding, or speed (although all three could be far better), but more so in terms of coming away from a book with a well-founded opinion on its artistic quality, the way I do for a movie, or an episode of television. The reason for this is two-fold, I think, one being related to how the medium functions. Unlike the audio-visual immersion offered by TV and film, a book puts more onus on the audience to construct the narrative for themselves. The fact that I work in the evaluation, and not creation side of pop culture, should be a hint as to how well wired my brain is to filling in the author’s blanks. The other reason relates to how I actually read, which is based on finishing a novel in as few sessions as possible. This has the effect of broadening the amount of material to be analyzed between reading breaks, which may in fact be how some authors prefer their works be enjoyed, but leaves me often missing the artistic trees of the prose for the mechanical forest of plot.
I’ve made my peace with being out of my depth when approaching the literary world with critical intentions, but find that feeling of haziness that comes with finishing a novel as more and more analogous to how I feel after wrapping up an entire 13-episode TV season over a short time frame. It’s a feeling that’s becoming more common, and problematic as the best television out there moves further away from the importance of the individual episode, and focuses more on the whole of the season. This is exactly what guys like David Simon and Matthew Weiner want. As prestige dramas push passed simply being serialized, and start adopting the storytelling structure and mechanics of novels, any given plot thread on Treme, character in Mad Men, or entire episode of either show can end up seeming like a disparate element at first glance. Once you’ve finished the season though, and see the greater whole all those plots, characters and episodes are meant to contribute to, it can be a revelation; indeed, my favorite TV drama ever built a motto out of reassuring its audience that, yes, all the pieces matter.
And like a novel, the first few entries in most series can sometimes feel like a chore, so Netflix’s distribution model is immensely helpful for giving viewers the ability to power through the table setting leading up to the main course. But for the vast majority of series, including the novelistic ones, giving the viewer absolute control over when, and how quickly they watch a show has crippled the social elements that have helped define television’s existence up until now. By eliminating the need to watch TV on a set schedule, conversation about the show gets cutoff at the knees. Maybe it’s because it seems like we’re becoming more indulgent as a culture (the theatre debate can attest to that), but it’s getting harder to tell the difference between Hollywood, and the junk food industry, tweaking and perfecting its formula for finding the individual consumer’s bliss point.
Where Netflix exploits gluttony, cinema is becoming more and more a dessert factory, shoving one nutritionless confectioner after another right in front of you. To take this all back a few thousand words, the answer to why there’s no enthusiasm for properties like Batman Vs Superman, and Avatars two through four, is that their abundance is proof of their disposability. The development speed and marketability required to keep the factory running at peak capacity doesn’t leave room for texturing a product into something thought provoking. Memorable characters and unique narrative are never as important as the general feeling of satisfaction the product is meant to induce.
A film like Elysium, which tries to cram a brain into its futuristic sci-fi robot exoskeleton, causes most of the debate to focus on how trying to say something makes the film better or worse, rather than the things the film wants to say about the wealth gap and health care. That’s because the message itself is as one note and monotonous as the mindless spectacle surrounding it; it’s an episode of G.I. Joe, heavyhanded moralizing and all, instead of a readable text made up of individual scenes, directorial choices, and editing choices that can be parsed and interpreted. With no trees to focus on, the forest is all that matters, which leads to passionate discourse about the aesthetic and artistic merits of a film devolving into fanboy rants and complaints about plot holes. In critiquing a recent list from Total Film that wanted to perform liposuction on 50 films too long for their attention span, Matt Singer pointed out a belief that enjoyment of a film isn’t total unless it has the chance to be discussed, something I believe applies equally to television, but is also disappearing.
To wrap things up, I want to talk about Breaking Bad, which might turn out to be the biggest show of the year in terms of volume of discussion and cultural impact. Its sixth* season premiere drew 6 million viewers last Sunday. Even repeats on a Friday night can do better than that on a broadcast network, but for a cable network like AMC, 6 million sets of eyeballs makes for a hit. Not a Walking Dead-sized hit, mind you, which is AMC’s champion horse that does ratings even the networks would envy, but compared to how it first started, the numbers Breaking Bad is pulling in now better fit its place in the current cultural zeitgeist. It represents the death rattle of the current television Golden era of the White Male Anti-Hero, fittingly being the most popular of such programs since the granddaddy of the whole genre, The Sopranos.
*Technically, it’s the beginning of the second half of Season 5, but the more than year’s wait since the final “oh shit” moment of 2012 has made the transition feel less like an unpausing and more like the beginning of the final arc.
Breaking Bad will be the heart-stopping climax of the third television golden age, but Mad Men will be its more sanctified denouement, even though itwill likely end its run next year with less than half of the ratings Breaking Bad will pull in. But what Mad Men does share with Breaking Bad, besides a common interest in Star Trek fan fiction, is that both have seen their ratings grow remarkably since premiering in 2007, and 2008, respectively. As noted by Vulture contributor Josef Adalian, the “slow-mo explosion” of ratings both shows have experienced over their runs has been a result of AMC allowing each to cultivate and maintain the specific brand of quality programming that made their channel matter in the first place. While The Walking Dead proved to be an out-of-the-box hit, with ratings that climbed in inverse proportion to how good the show actually was, Breaking Bad, and to a lesser extent Mad Men, have proven that if the show really is good enough, it will attract a wider audience over its life span.
It’s impossible not to attribute at least some of those insane jumps in ratings between seasons to Netflix-like services, as getting new viewers caught up has always been a barrier keeping serialized programming from growing. And while many of those new fans will complain about the unbearable wait between episodes, they may not realize that the waiting can make for the most fun. Even if you end up watching the show alone, or have no one to chat with about it at the water cooler, the internet has made it easier than ever to share your thoughts, and see others. While the art of “recapping” seems to be going the way of the dodo, some of the best writing about television out there comes from passionate viewers and critics expressing how each week’s installment played for them.
One such critic, Myles McNutt, has been waging a one-man war against the image of recapping as just an outlet for fanboys to write episode summaries padded out with the snark they couldn’t share with anyone in real life (on a completely unrelated note, here are reviews for the last fewepisodes ofUnder the Dome). It’s one I whole-heartedly agree with, not just because of how good the write-ups from the likes of McNutt, Maureen Ryan, and Alan Sepinwall* usually are, but because of how they offer an outlet for viewers to share their own opinions, and have the opinions of others expand their own. I’d wager a big part of Breaking Bad’s continuing success has been the result of its willingness to still make each individual hour a discrete work of its own, but one that still fits as a piece of the show’s greater puzzle. Encouraging discussion and analysis on both a micro and macro level is what makes for great art, and that’s exactly why Breaking Bad will be going out as one of the all-time great TV dramas, no which way it rides off into the sunset.
*That’s naming just a paltry few writers doing exceptional work analyzing art mere hours after viewing it, including Linda Holmes, Matt Zoller Seitz, Donna Bowman, and Todd VavDerWerff. If anything, the problem is that there are too many such pieces being released after every episode of Mad Men, Breaking Bad and the like, making for a hell of a reading list come Monday morning.
So how was the premiere anyway? Well, it was Breaking Bad, which is to say it was never anything less than completely captivating and excellent. And at the same time, you can tell it’s time to close the book on this story, and kind of storytelling general. In the last thought piece I wrote that ran wildly beyond the proposed wordcount, which was about the video game The Last of Us, critic Leigh Alexander succinctly summed up the same experience much more gracefully, and in far fewer words, as “the last story of the strong man at the end of the world that I need to play.” I can’t help but feel the same about the position Breaking Bad holds in the current television landscape. Hidden behind the colloquialism, the show’s title is deceptively blunt; this is the story of what happens when someone embraces illegality, immorality, and even pure evil. It is the purest dramatic distillation of the 21st century crisis of masculinity, and economy, one that no one should attempt to try again. We already have Breaking Bad, and now it’s time for something new.
