It seems appropriate that on a day devoted to saving the internet, we take some time to appreciate one of the best things to come from an internet relatively free of slow lanes. Netflix isn’t much of a plucky startup underdog anymore, but compared to the internet service providers which extort it, it’s still one of the little guys. Netflix is great for binge-watching TV shows you didn’t watch live, it’s arguably even better for binge-watching TV shows they created.
My favorite is Orange is the New Black, which has somehow only won three Emmy awards. And while this summer has been mighty depressing for about a million reasons, your viewing of Orange is the New Black isn’t complete without the Washington City Paper’s commentary track.
It’s not a behind the scenes oral history of the show or the book or the casting or the writing of the theme song. It’s a reporter watching Orange with a woman who spent some time in a state prison about a decade ago. Her lengthy (and expletive-laden) critiques of the show’s depiction of prison had me in stitches.
I was in prison for four years, and I can’t ever remember one group of people really cheering somebody on. It was always really adversarial, even among crews of people. And, like, the worst thing you could possibly do was to be good at something in front of everybody. That was the same thing as saying that you were better than everybody else, and nobody tolerated that shit for very long.
Whether it was real or imagined, you couldn’t make people think you were above them. So you just sort of stayed shitty at everything. Like, nobody was painting, or writing, or drawing, or anything creative. I mean, people would sing, but everybody sucked at that, so that was ok.
That part actually sounds like how I remember high school. There are six parts to this series, and you can catch Part 1 here.