Jenji Kohan at work on Orange Is the New Black in November 2013.
Jenji Kohan’s Weeds and Orange Is the New Black
Jenji Kohan at work on Orange Is the New Black in November 2013.
Jenji Kohan’s production company is nestled inside an ornate old theater building near Los Angeles’s seedy MacArthur Park. A grand, tangerine-colored hallway leads to the staff’s offices. Orange Is the New Black executive producer Mark Burley sits in back in an office decorated with an inflatable palm tree and Santeria candles featuring Orange Is the New Black characters. He is musing on what unites Kohan heroines such as Weeds’s Nancy Botwin and Orange’s Piper Chapman. “It is somebody who comes from a fairly normal middle-class morality set who behaves outside that morality set. Nancy and Piper are making their own morality,” Burley concludes.
“I think people generally reassure themselves that they are the good guy, even when they are not,” Kohan elaborates several months later. She says she is fascinated by the way that people in morally compromised situations “create codes, lines you won’t cross so you can keep telling yourself you are a good person.”
When Showtime picked up Weeds in 2004, male antiheroes swaggered across the cable landscape like malevolent gods. Jenji Kohan had a response to macho archetypes like Tony Soprano: Nancy Botwin, a suburban homemaker turned gangster whose journey would whisk her from bake sales and PTA meetings to weed dealing and standoffs with drug lords.
“I prefer the gray areas,” says Kohan, who favors bright, candy-colored hair. “With Weeds, I was looking for a little more truth in my characters. It’s actually easier to identify with people who are flawed.” Kohan plunged deeper into the gray zone with Orange Is the New Black, a show consisting entirely of people who, on paper, ought to be utterly unsympathetic: hardened criminals and their callous or corrupt jailers. Now she was interweaving the plotlines of dozens of antiheroines, each of whom seized tiny moments of elation and enlightenment in the shadow of the prison industrial complex.
“A good deal of people in prison are serving time for the worst day of their lives or a really bad situation they were in, not because of the darkness of their soul,” Kohan says ruefully. “They are spending a great deal of time in prison for crimes that took very little time to commit. I think there are those who are nuts or evil—but very few. People are more complicated than that.”
Television is Jenji Kohan’s birthright. Her father, Buz, is an Emmy-winning TV writer who hauled his family from New York City to Los Angeles when he got a gig on The Carol Burnett Show. Her older brother, David, went into the family business, too, co-creating the sitcom Will & Grace.
Dinner-table conversation was competitive in the Kohan home, with both parents being writers (her mom, Rhea, is a novelist). “They say there are book Jews and money Jews,” Jenji once told the Jewish Journal. “We were raised book Jews; it was about intellectual and educational and personal achievement. It wasn’t about accumulation.”
The Kohan kids were expected to become doctors or lawyers or scientists. That held little interest for young Jenji, who won some writing contests as a teenager. While attending Columbia University in the late eighties, she landed an internship at Franklin Furnace, a downtown Manhattan haven for spoken-word performance artists such as Eric Bogosian, Spalding Gray, and Karen Finley, which came under fire from Senator Jesse Helms at the height of the culture wars. Kohan briefly entertained thoughts of being a spoken-word performance artist. Looking back now, though, she practically snorts at the idea. “I’m not comfortable onstage. I am very blinky; my voice is very nasal!” she says. So, after graduation, she returned to Los Angeles, where she cobbled together journalism internships and odd jobs.
Kohan never seriously considered taking up her dad’s line of work until an ex-boyfriend negged her, saying she had more chance of “getting elected to Congress” than working on a TV show. “My impetus was vengeance, initially,” she admits. “I don’t like to be told I can’t do something!”
While her medical-student roommate pored over anatomy textbooks, Kohan made a forensic study of comedy videotapes from shows such as Roseanne, The Simpsons, and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, then churned out spec scripts. Although her father was a show-biz veteran and her brother, David, was already making his way up the industry ladder, neither was prepared to give her a leg up: “They were like, ‘Go to law school!’ They wanted me to be independent.” Eventually, a friend of the family handed Kohan’s spec scripts to an agent who worked in his building. That led to a job on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where she was often the only woman in the writers’ room. Kohan, just twenty-two, found the Fresh Prince workplace dysfunctional and frustrating. Racial tensions were taut in the wake of the LA riots. She told NPR that, after they’d attended a Louis Farrakhan rally, some of her colleagues started to refer to her by a nickname: “White Devil Jew Bitch.”
Talking about her ability to rub colleagues the wrong way, Kohan admits with a chuckle, “I’m a big personality, shall we say. I realized early on my path would be easier if I were in charge.”
So she began writing pilot scripts every season, hoping to find a side door to success. One of her scripts got her hired on Friends, a job she lost thirteen episodes later, after arguing with her older bosses about the authenticity of the twenty-something characters. Rethinking her career choice, Kohan left Hollywood to hike through Nepal. But even in the midst of Himalayan grandeur, she couldn’t shake the TV bug, cranking out a draft of a spec script for Frasier in the land of Sherpas and Buddhist monks. “That made me realize, maybe I’m not quite done,” she laughs. Kohan went back home and wrote for Boston Common, Mad About You, and Gilmore Girls, but none of the jobs lasted. It wasn’t until 1996, when she landed a job on HBO’s Tracey Ullman sketch-comedy series Tracey Takes On, that she found anyone approximating a mentor.
What Kohan learned by observing Ullman up close was “how to run a healthy show,” one that didn’t involve bruising ego battles and soul-sapping creative conflict. Kohan also found it helpful that she could give Ullman material and she would “immediately perform it and let me know how it was.” Kohan stayed for four seasons, during which she won an Emmy. Yet all the while, she kept on writing pilots—seventeen or so, among which were a couple of near misses.
In 2004, one of Kohan’s creations finally made it onto the small screen. CBS sitcom The Stones was advertised as “from the creators of Will & Grace,” David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. Its true mastermind was David’s thirty-five-year-old sister. The Stones starred Judith Light and Robert Klein as a divorced couple living under one roof, tossing barbed comments at each other as their long-suffering kids looked on. (“Are you sure you’re at your dating weight?” Light quips. “Watch me lose a hundred thirty pounds in one second,” Klein replies, removing his wedding ring.) With low ratings and mediocre reviews, the show was axed after several episodes.
Jenni Konner, who worked on The Stones’s writing staff, was struck by Kohan’s originality even then. “I just think network wasn’t a place for Jenji. It’s not even because she was trying to do extreme sex scenes or something like that. It just felt like there was this innate struggle that I hadn’t seen on other shows.” Part of that, Konner says, was that Jenji didn’t have complete control—and, she adds, “the person who had control over her was her older brother. Who wants that? There are some people who should just have their own place in the world.”
Christopher Noxon, Kohan’s husband and collaborator, calls The Stones “a crushing experience, where she really just threw her hands up. Weeds was her Hail Mary,” he says. “It was like, ‘All right, fuck all of ya.’ ” Kohan was ready to give up her network-television dream and make her way in the promised land of cable TV.
Despite her background in lighthearted family sitcoms, Kohan secretly yearned to create a female antihero. Obsessed with The Shield and The Sopranos, she decided to write a series centered on a criminal. The only question was: which crime? Pot was in the news then, thanks to California’s medical marijuana initiative Proposition 213, so Kohan fastened on the idea of a suburban homemaker who turns to drug dealing to support her family after her husband’s death. HBO passed on her pitch, but pay cable competitor Showtime took a gamble on it.
For years, Showtime had been struggling to escape the shadow cast by the critically acclaimed HBO. At first, it tried targeting the neglected niches of America: Queer as Folk for the LGBTQ crowd, Resurrection Blvd. for Latinos, Soul Food for African Americans. Then, in 2003, new head of programming Robert Greenblatt (who’d been an executive producer on Six Feet Under and had been involved in the Sopranos pilot) took over. He itched to compete on HBO’s challenging terrain.
So, when Jenji Kohan walked into the Showtime offices and pitched Weeds, the executives listened eagerly. Sitting in a lotus position on the couch, Kohan told vice president Danielle Gelber that the idea was inspired by the mother of a high school friend who dealt pot. While visiting her friend’s house one day and looking for an after-school snack, young Jenji opened the refrigerator crisper and found marijuana instead. The mom, Kohan recalled, wore a blazer with secret compartments stuffed with pot. Gelber sensed that Kohan, if unleashed, could make a lot of noise for Showtime.
“Weeds felt really fresh and different,” says Burley, a Brit with a bone-dry manner who was quickly hired as a producer. “Marijuana is now legal in some states and may be legal in all the Blue states in a few years, but at that time it felt out there.” Weeds’s tone was also unorthodox: it was a half-hour series that mixed black comedy and soapy drama. The word dramedy had been coined in the late eighties for shows, such as The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, that slipped dark subject matter into the traditionally lighthearted sitcom format. The genre requires actors who can operate on several levels simultaneously. In true comedy, a happy ending is assured; in dramedy, a character might be making people laugh while disaster enfolds her.
Kohan wrote Nancy Botwin to be “human, relatable, flawed,” and she needed to find an actress who could make all those qualities come to life. Stage and screen actress Mary-Louise Parker had won a Tony for the play Proof and an Emmy for her role as a hallucinating Mormon in Angels in America; she’d recently come off a run playing feminist Amy Gardner on West Wing and gravitated to the edgy suburbia Kohan had conjured with Weeds. A single mother herself, she found the show’s relatively brief commitment (thirteen half-hour episodes) appealing.
“There were other TV shows offered to me at the time, and people were like, ‘You are really going to do a show on Showtime?’ It was like I was saying I was going to do a show at Duane Reade!” Parker says, sitting in a banquette at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, dressed in drapey black layers of fabric. In the flesh, she seems to vibrate emotion as viscerally as she does on-screen.
“West Wing lived within its framework. There are things you just can’t do on West Wing. But there was almost nothing you couldn’t do on Weeds,” she says, exhaling deeply. It was a show where plot twists “bumped up against moments of sweetness and humanity—that’s what made it difficult to pinpoint as a comedy or a drama.”
The pilot suggests that Weeds might be a sly swipe at American hypocrisy. Setting recently widowed Nancy Botwin against the backdrop of a conservative suburban community, it opens with her standing before a PTA meeting. None of her fellow parents has any idea that while the Botwin kids are at school, Nancy commutes between her gated community and the kitchen of her drug supplier, Heylia (Tonye Patano). Nancy tries hard to prove to Heylia and her extended family that she’s not a “dumbass white bitch” slumming it in the ghetto, but she keeps giving herself away, such as when she hands over money for the week’s weed supply in a cute ribbon-tied package, as if it’s a crafting project. A lot of the show’s laughs, and its uncomfortable edge, come from the way that Nancy doesn’t fit in in either of the worlds she moves through.
Weeds had wicked fun tampering with the wholesome, all-American ideal of the soccer mom: While watching her son Shane play a match, Nancy slips city councilman stoner Doug (ex-SNL star Kevin Nealon) a magazine containing his stash. She is employing the kind of housewifely pluck that once led women to become Avon ladies—except she’s peddling a whole other brand of escapism.
By the middle of the first season, however, it became clear that Kohan had something altogether more deranged in mind than satirizing suburbia. Intoxicated by danger and fueled by caffeine, Nancy begins seeking ever-wilder thrills. Instead of being intimidated by a rival local drug dealer, she screws him in an alley in broad daylight. Similarly, when she realizes that her new fling (indie film favorite Martin Donovan) is a DEA agent, she marries him. Not only won’t he turn her in, he busts her competition. At every turn, she uses her beauty as a weapon or a shield, eventually working her way up the illicit-drugs chain until she is romancing Tijuana mayor Esteban Reyes (Demián Bichir), whose public office conceals his secret identity as a narcotics kingpin.
Nancy is a complex, towering antiheroine, and Parker imbues this ruthless character with a crumbly fragility. You can see emotions percolating under the surface of her ivory skin, as if she were mustering all her energy to maintain that deadpan composure.
“Nancy doesn’t think ahead very much, doesn’t really put other people ahead of her. People who have a sweetness about them—they get away with a lot of shit,” Parker says, her lips turning up in what could be a grin or a grimace. “I love that character, and I love how Nancy is ultimately a very charming woman used to things going her way.” That self-belief powers her self-reinvention from forty-something wife and mother to canny entrepreneur, cooking up a succession of businesses. There’s a baked-goods shop, grow houses, a potent strain of pot dubbed “MILF weed,” in honor of the then recently coined slang, and in a flash forward to the near future, a chain of legal marijuana stores so successful that Starbucks wants to buy them. She is a paragon of American start-up success.
As deliciously brazen as Nancy Botwin is, there are always a half-dozen other brilliantly drawn characters orbiting and abetting her: her brother-in-law, Andy (Justin Kirk), a slacker who teaches Nancy’s sons important lessons (such as how to masturbate effectively) and emerges as the unlikely moral compass of the series; the aforementioned Doug, who becomes Chong to Andy’s Cheech in their own personal stoner comedy; next-door neighbor Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), Nancy’s nemesis, who’s put through the ringer with cancer and prison. And of course, there are Nancy’s two young sons: Silas (Hunter Parrish), who retains an essential goodness, and Shane (Alexander Gould), who blossoms into a fine young sociopath.
While she leverages her sexuality and thrives on risk, Nancy strives to be a good mother to her boys. But her job continually puts her family in jeopardy; even worse, it becomes clear that she finds playing for high stakes way more fulfilling than living her stable old life as wife and mom. Her TV precursors Roseanne Conner (who barked insults at her kids but provided a bedrock of affection and support) and Lorelai Gilmore (who fed Rory a diet of junk food but devoted her whole existence to her daughter) were lousy parents only when measured against an impossible maternal ideal. Nancy veers perilously close to becoming the one thing that TV audiences had never accepted from a woman: an actively bad mother, someone who puts her children in harm’s way while also eroding their sense of right and wrong.
Even Botwin “family time” sometimes results in rather warped scenarios. When the boys’ grandmother Bubbe, hooked up to a life-support machine in her home, begs to be allowed to die, Nancy makes a graceful elegiac speech and shuts off the respirator. Yet Bubbe’s body stubbornly breathes on. As the camera pulls outside into the dark night, as if withdrawing from a scene too awful to contemplate, you can hear Nancy’s dry command: “Shane, get Mommy a pillow.” We never see Bubbe again.
Although Showtime encouraged Kohan’s imagination, Burley recalls some early concerns about increasingly edgy plots involving Nancy’s sons. “There were strong discussions about whether [the kids] should be smoking pot or selling pot,” he says. “But Jenji would stick to her guns, and after a while they stopped asking. They were a little afraid of her.” And what about the child actors themselves, Hunter Parrish and Alexander Gould? Jenji confesses to feeling guilty sometimes about giving the boys such “rough material.” She says, “I hope they can pay extensive therapy bills with the money they made on the show.”
Battered by the network sitcom system, Kohan had long dreamed of creating her own work environment: a sane, balanced place for the hatching of unbalanced characters.
Parker’s relationship with Kohan, however, became a tense battle of wills between two detail-oriented women with strong visions. “She’s very used to getting her way, and this was my baby,” Kohan told an audience at the Writers Guild in 2010. “There was a lot of push and pull.” Eventually, producer Lisa Vinnecour became a kind of liaison mediating between the showrunner and the actress. A “diva whisperer” (as Kohan once called her), Vinnecour went on to run the Orange Is the New Black set, where she made the sprawling cast feel like a tight-knit family. Vinnecour shrugs off the word diva, however, protesting, “These are artists.”
Like Shonda Rhimes, Kohan swore by a “no assholes” hiring policy. This became even more of a priority when she gave birth to her third child on the night of the Weeds premiere in August 2005. She brought in Roberto Benabib (a filmmaker who had written for Ally McBeal) to help run the writers’ room. At first it consisted largely of men (several of them playwrights); as the series progressed, Kohan hired more women, but she believed that hiring ought to be gender-blind and color-blind. “I think it’s really limiting to say that only women can write women or black people can write black people,” she tells me. “It’s an exercise in imagination!”
Exercise their imagination the Weeds writers did. Every time the series seemed to be settling into a groove, Kohan and company yanked the carpet out from under it. After three successful seasons set in the upper-middle-class suburb of Agrestic, California, Kohan says, “The writers were getting antsy and talking about projects they wanted to write in the off-season. I said, ‘What do we have to do here to bring all the creative energy back into the room?’ And they basically said, ‘We’re sick of suburbia.’ ”
Kohan unleashed a radical solution: she burned down Agrestic and relocated the action to a beachside town, bringing in new characters and eliminating some old favorites. This became a pattern: whenever the show seemed to be stagnating, Nancy and her drug-peddling clan moved elsewhere—to Mexico, across America, and eventually back to a rebuilt Agrestic. “We write ourselves into a corner, we all go away and relax, and then we come back and say, ‘How do we get ourselves out of this mess that we made?’ ” is how Kohan explains the Botwin family’s trademark restlessness.
Her craving for change even manifested itself in the show’s theme music. She had chosen the acerbic, anti-suburbia folk song “Little Boxes,” by Malvina Reynolds, from the outset—in fact, when she was struggling to write the pilot script, she typed the song’s lyrics just to fill up the first page. Christopher Noxon, initially the show’s music supervisor, says they quickly started thinking about using cover versions of the song, because they were bored with the original. “That is the story of Weeds,” Noxon says. “Jenji just didn’t want to do the same thing again.” Soon they were barraged by requests to cover “Little Boxes,” and went on to air versions from dozens of musicians, including Elvis Costello, Death Cab for Cutie, Angélique Kidjo, and Regina Spektor.
Ultimately, Weeds accomplished exactly what Showtime had hoped. It reframed the cable network as a creative daredevil in the scripted-television arena, a brash upstart nipping at HBO’s heels. To solidify its image as a home for dangerous women with attitude, Showtime launched a string of shows created by women: Ilene Chaiken, Michele Abbott, and Kathy Greenberg’s The L Word; Lucy Prebble’s Secret Diary of a Call Girl; Liz Brixius and Linda Wallem’s Nurse Jackie; Diablo Cody’s United States of Tara; and Darlene Hunt’s The Big C. At a time when HBO had no series by female creators on the air, flawed heroines became Showtime’s signature. By the end of 2009, the pay cable network had increased its subscribers by more than 25 percent.
Yet Weeds itself never quite got the respect it deserved. Was it because it was a half-hour dramedy rather than an hour-long drama? Was it because its protagonist was a middle-aged mom? Or maybe because the show kept remaking itself?
A year after Weeds’s debut, another series about an ordinary person who turns to drug dealing to support the family premiered on AMC. Breaking Bad featured a mild-mannered high school science teacher named Walter White who, like Nancy Botwin, deployed charisma and cunning to penetrate the closed circuit of the drug underworld. Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad’s creator, confessed that he hadn’t heard about Kohan’s show when he pitched his own series. “If I had known of Weeds weeks or even days prior to that meeting, it’s likely I wouldn’t have had the will to go on,” Gilligan told Newsweek. But because he didn’t subscribe to Showtime, he wrote and sold his tale of a geek turned sociopath.
Walt represented the domesticated middle-aged American Everyman whose suppressed masculinity would burst through if truly tested—an alluring fantasy for suburban drones everywhere. Nancy also held the promise of self-transformation through accessing hidden depths of reckless courage and ruthlessness—but this was not something a mainstream audience necessarily enjoyed seeing in a middle-aged mom. By Breaking Bad’s finale, there was no doubt that Walt had become monstrous—yet he finished his life on his own terms, without ever going to jail. Nancy, on the other hand, gets her comeuppance. In season seven, we see her dressed in shapeless green prison garb at the conclusion of her three-year sentence in a Connecticut federal prison.
Just as Nancy Botwin was leaving behind prison life, Jenji Kohan’s jail time was beginning.
While Kohan was working on the final season of Weeds, a friend gave her a copy of Piper Kerman’s memoir Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison. Kohan thought it would make a perfect next project, but when she pitched it to Showtime, she was stunned to hear them turning her down.
“I had your hit show for eight years, and you don’t want my next thing?” she marvels, her voice quivering with anger even now. But it wasn’t just Showtime that was skeptical about the appeal and viability of a show involving a multiracial cast of female criminals. “HBO passed,” Kohan notes sourly. “A lot of places passed.”
Amid all this disappointment, Netflix swooped in. An online movie-rental store, Netflix had grand ambitions to create and stream original content. So far, it had bought only one series, a political drama called House of Cards that hadn’t yet aired. It needed Kohan to lend it creative credibility and nab the public’s attention, as she had helped do for Showtime. So Netflix tempted Kohan with an enticing offer: the chance to make thirteen hour-long episodes, with no test pilot required and minimal network interference.
While the Weeds scribes worked on the Botwins’ final season, Kohan brought in a new group of writers to work on Orange Is the New Black in the same building at Universal Studios. “Weeds was her baby, so those of us on Orange, we kind of felt like we were the redheaded stepchildren living in the basement,” says Sian Heder, who wrote for the show’s first four seasons. “We were the new kids. And we had a pretty daunting task, because there was no pilot.” Kohan had originally cowritten a script with House producer Liz Friedman, but the partnership had not worked out. “There was a pilot that she wasn’t happy with, and we weren’t allowed to see it, so we just talked about the book and what the show could be,” says Nick Jones, a playwright who moved to Los Angeles to work on the show. “I was surprised at how unstructured it all was. We seemed to spend weeks just getting to know each other and going on walks and just talking about issues.” They also met former inmates and visited a women’s state prison.
Orange’s author, Piper Kerman, is a college-educated Brooklyn woman who ended up in jail for a youthful stint as a drug dealer. Her memoir offers a personal view of the dynamics among female prisoners. A few figures stand out, such as Pop, the Russian mobster’s wife; Morena, a Latina prisoner with crazy eyes; and Pornstar, a mustachioed prison guard. Kohan quickly realized that, for legal and creative reasons, they’d have to change some characters and invent others. She deemed the blond, fictional version of Piper her “Trojan horse,” explaining to an audience at a 2014 live event, “If you go into a network and say, ‘I want to do a show about poor Latinas and black women and their issues,’ it’s not a big selling tool. The Private Benjamin/white girl/fish-out-of-water conceit is familiar, and it’s an easier sell—but it was never my intention to just tell Piper’s story; it was a gateway to all the stories.”
With no model to work from and no actors yet attached to the series, the writers were flying blind. For instance, they knew Kohan wanted a transgender character in the fictional Litchfield Penitentiary, ideally to be played by an actual trans actor, but that was pretty much all they had to go on. So, when Heder wrote the script for Orange’s third episode, which gave viewers Sophia Burset’s backstory, she had to keep an open mind. “I thought, This could be a working-class white person, this could be an African American person,” Heder says. “I just had to create a great story and be adaptable with the dialogue or that person’s mannerisms.”
Kohan wanted to base Orange in Los Angeles, where her three kids were happily ensconced in school, but the studio preferred New York, for tax reasons. As a compromise, they resolved to split the production: filming would be done at Kaufman Astoria Studios, in Queens, with Lisa Vinnecour supervising the actors in Kohan’s stead, while the writers’ room and postproduction would stay in LA with Kohan and Burley. This was an unorthodox choice, separating the showrunner from the show, but it would end up being a huge advantage in terms of access to talent, since many of the women they ultimately cast were New York–based theater actors with little or no TV experience.
Kohan asked Girls casting director Jennifer Euston to help her assemble a large, star-free cast. What the showrunner had in mind for Orange surpassed even the diversity of Shondaland’s shows: a cast composed of women of all racial backgrounds but also all ages and sizes. Rhimes had nudged color consciousness to its limits on network television, but her spot at ABC meant she could push only so far past mainstream ideas of beauty. Jenji wanted to steer Orange into cinema verité territory: having the “Hollywood pretty” Piper character at the show’s center would only accentuate Orange’s realistic depiction of the other women’s bodies.
“Unknowns, all women—and so many minority women? I was like a kid in a candy store!” Euston recalls of the casting process. She had so many favorite actresses who, because of their color, size, age, or unconventional looks, could never get more than bit parts. And here was Kohan, promising possible series-regular roles for these great stage and character actresses.
Euston didn’t have much material to work with for the initial auditions. For the role of an inmate named Taystee, she had just a single line—“You got those TV titties, all nice and perky!” Taystee says admiringly of Piper’s breasts in the shower room—but actress Danielle Brooks exuded a joyfulness that fit the part. Uzo Aduba was on the verge of quitting acting to go to law school when she read for the character of Jenae, a former track star. A runner herself, Aduba arrived for the audition with her hair tied in knots and a white tank top to show off her arms. Kohan later watched the tape and said, “I want Uzo for Crazy Eyes!” Euston was baffled. “I said, ‘Who is Crazy Eyes?’ She wasn’t even in the script at that point. But Jenji took the pool of people that I showed her, and if she liked them, she would just find them a part.”
Although most of the roles went to unknowns, Kohan drafted several familiar faces, such as Kate Mulgrew, Laura Prepon, Taryn Manning, and Jason Biggs. The role of Piper went to Taylor Schilling, who had starred in NBC’s medical series Mercy, and Kohan brought over a few actors she’d worked with on Weeds, including Pablo Schreiber (who would play the creepy corrections officer nicknamed Pornstache), Michael Harney (the slightly less creepy prison counselor Healy), and Natasha Lyonne.
Lyonne was playing a small part on the final season of Weeds when she got a hold of the Orange script and nearly jumped out of her skin with excitement. She quickly started trying to convince Kohan and director Michael Trim that she was a perfect fit for the role of tough-talking, sweet-hearted junkie Nicky Nichols, using her own public struggle with smack as a guarantee of authenticity. “I know you’re thinking, How could this girl have had a tough life?” Lyonne recalls telling Kohan and Trim. “Google it. I have a criminal record to back this show up!” Lyonne, a native New Yorker known for roles in Slums of Beverly Hills and American Pie, worried that the plum part would go to an ethereal twenty-something waif. But her “I’m a junkie, honest!” pitch did the trick.
Sitting in a booth at a Los Angeles diner, Lyonne holds forth in her brassy New York accent, sounding more like a bawdy old Jewish man than the petite thirty-seven-year-old actress she is. Beneath those wide eyes and waves of red hair, Lyonne says she feels a kinship with the kind of hard-veneer 1970s male characters played by Robert De Niro, Harry Dean Stanton, and Gene Hackman. The part of Nicky Nichols, an ever-shifting mix of loyal friend, lesbian lothario, brittle fuckup, and relapsing addict, plays to her strengths.
Like Lyonne, many of the actresses on the show had struggled for years in the business, too oddball to fit the kind of cookie-cutter roles that generally presented themselves. But now, with Orange, they finally had a chance to shine.
“A lot of the women in the show are too distracting in their originality,” Lyonne suggests. “So we are blown away that the secret all along was: Dorothy, be yourself.” She tugs at her white-and-blue-striped sweater as if there’s something crawling inside it, and finally pulls it off, revealing a delicate black lace camisole underneath. “The actresses were all past the time where it was do-or-die for them—they were just over the hump of whatever life horror it was that didn’t break them. So they were willing to bring all that to the table and access it without having it destroy them.”
Laverne Cox is a transgender actress who was performing at the East Village drag bar Lucky Cheng’s when she auditioned to play Sophia Burset. “Laverne is a great example of someone who for sure was bringing aspects of her personal journey,” says Lyonne. Cox embraced the role of Sophia, a former fireman who winds up in prison after engaging in credit card fraud to finance her transition. At the time, there had been very few recurring transgender characters on episodic television, and the broader conversation about trans identity and rights hadn’t yet reached mainstream America. (Caitlyn Jenner came out as a trans woman nearly two years after Orange premiered.)
Determined to make Sophia Burset realistic and sympathetic, Sian Heder interviewed a number of transgender people before writing the season-one episode that detailed Sophia’s life before prison. The result was a character who was “kind of selfish in some ways,” not to mention a criminal. Heder was worried about the potential for backlash, she says, “but I think trans people were so relieved to have a three-dimensional person on-screen, warts and all.”
The episode suggests Sophia has escaped the jail of gender only to be incarcerated once again. We catch a glimpse of Sophia’s troubles within the prison system, which declines to pay for the female hormones she needs. And we hark back to her transitioning in the years before she’s sent to Litchfield: trying on tacky girl’s clothes in front of wife Crystal—“You look like Hannah Montana,” Crystal teases—and dealing with a young son who is angry and embarrassed by Sophia’s metamorphosis.
“The big problem with that episode was that we had to have scenes where she used to be a man,” says co-executive producer Lisa Vinnecour. Although Cox was game, the facial hair just didn’t look right on her, so the search began for a male look-alike. “We were really struggling, and then Laverne mentioned, just real casual one day, ‘You know I have a twin brother?’ We had no idea!” So Cox’s twin, M. Lamar, swept in and played the part so well that many viewers didn’t realize they’d used a double.
Less than a year after the show’s premiere, Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine, won a GLAAD Award, and became the first transgender actress nominated for an Emmy. “What’s revolutionary is not that there’s a trans character, or even that a trans character is being played by a trans actor, although that’s a big deal,” Cox told the New York Times in 2014. “But it’s written in such a profoundly human way, so that audiences are connecting with this person that they didn’t expect to connect with.”
That’s true of so many of the inmates, castaways on an Island of Misfit Toys populated by women rarely seen on American TV, unless it’s on reality shows or the news. They are Latina or black or Asian, elderly or sickly, overweight or skeletal, and all of them carry backstories of emotional trouble, or crippling poverty, or sexual abuse, or drug addiction. Out of the pandemonium of clashing personalities and ethnic rivalries, an aria gradually emerges: broken lives converge into a ragged and unruly sort of harmony.
“People are living in more and more insulated worlds, in feedback loops,” Kohan says earnestly. “So if I can introduce something new to familiarize those people with others or the Other, and to help recognize parts of yourself in people you never thought you would, I feel like that is part of my job.”
A whirlwind of buzz met Orange Is the New Black almost as soon as Netflix made all thirteen episodes available in July 2013. It wasn’t just critics raving. Fans binged and tweeted and Facebooked and Instagrammed and created memes—all those digital modes of expressing enthusiasm and exuberantly arguing about a show’s merits or defects that have become integral to TV viewing in the twenty-first century. The first series to really benefit from Netflix’s approach of releasing all of a show’s episodes at once, Orange depended upon social media as a form of promotion, since it didn’t have weekly time slots around which an audience’s reactions could be synchronized and unified.
The network encouraged interaction with blooper videos and fan art, while the show’s stars offered up pictures of themselves palling around on set and supporting one another’s projects off set. It wasn’t just a publicity ploy, either; many of the actors had grown very close. In order to cultivate intimacy among the sprawling group, Lisa Vinnecour organized outings while shooting the first season. They might walk across the Brooklyn Bridge en masse or go for a drive to visit a haunted house in Connecticut. A few weeks after the first season premiered, Vinnecour invited everyone to her birthday party at a joint in Manhattan’s West Village.
“I started noticing other people surrounding us and whispering and pointing. Next thing you know, there’s a line forty people deep to get in,” Vinnecour says with amazement. “People are calling their friends, saying, ‘Get over here, the cast of Orange Is the New Black is here!’ That was when I realized, ‘Whoa, this show is much bigger than I expected it to be.’ ”
Shooting with such a massive cast (sometimes as many as eighty speaking parts in an episode) is challenging, but it eliminates any possibility that the writers will get bored, because there’s a kaleidoscopic array of personalities to probe. As Kohan promised, Piper acts as a stand-in for the average white upper-middlebrow viewer. She exudes unconscious white privilege from every invisible pore. “I’m gonna read everything on my Amazon wish list and maybe learn a craft!” is how she imagines she will make the most of her jail time, before she actually goes inside. Through Piper’s eyes, we learn the internal politics of this minimum-security prison, where women congregate in tribes based on ethnicity. Guards vacillate between well-meaning ineptitude and sadistic cruelty; earnest prison administrator Joe Caputo spends his downtime playing in a bar band called Side Boob.
The show is structured so that viewers can’t help but see past the khaki prison uniform to the human being inside. Each episode includes flashbacks that focus on a particular character’s backstory, complete with the miseries and misdeeds that set her on the path to incarceration. We glimpse self-possessed Taystee as an orphan who found a mentor in a charismatic neighborhood drug dealer, and learn that tough mother hen Gloria Mendoza (Selenis Leyva) committed food-stamp fraud in order to escape an abusive boyfriend. Often, our preconceptions about the characters are totally upended. In her flashback scenes, for instance, elderly Miss Rosa (Barbara Rosenblat) morphs back into the thrill-seeking sex-bomb bank robber she once was.
Possibly the supreme example of Orange’s trick of flipping the viewer’s assumptions involves the flashback story for Suzanne, the poetic, mentally troubled African American inmate nicknamed Crazy Eyes. Unlike some of the other inmates of color, who emerged from grim poverty and violent homes, Suzanne turns out to have grown up within the pampered security of an upper-middle-class white adoptive family. Sian Heder says this backstory wasn’t at all premeditated: Kohan inserted this detail into one of the scripts on the spur of the moment, detonating a little story bomb. “It was almost like a joke shot: ‘Cut to Crazy Eyes sitting with two white people, calling them Mommy and Daddy.’ But you create one little detail about the character, and it ripples through to the rest of the season. Every writer has to continue to build a world around that idea.”
Kohan had originally asked Jen Euston to fill even the most minor roles with powerful actors, so “if the part got bigger, they could nail it,” says Euston. Indeed, as time went on, characters who lurked in the background for whole seasons moved to center stage, and inmates who initially appeared to be one-dimensional thugs (at least to Piper’s eyes) were given intricate shading. One of those cartoony villains was Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett (Taryn Manning), a squirrelly looking, racist meth addict with lank hair and rotten teeth who’d been arrested for a shooting at an abortion clinic. When antiabortion supporters write her letters in prison, she assures them, “I’ll be out before the Rapture.”
Set up as Piper’s nemesis, she unexpectedly evolves into a thoughtful, sympathetic young woman forged by a childhood of malign neglect. Her mother’s advice that she should passively accept whatever men sexually inflict upon her shapes Doggett’s relationship with a new prison guard, Coates (James McMenamin). He seems like a gentle guy, and their outings in the prison van feel like joyful flirtation, an escape for both of them from their assigned roles as captor and convict. But then the true power imbalance reasserts itself, culminating in a heartrending rape scene in the van’s backseat. The camera bears witness, staying focused on Pennsatucky’s face as Coates forces himself upon her. Stoically withstanding the attack, just like her mama taught her, Pennsatucky makes no sound. Despite her best efforts to dissociate herself from her body, a single tear escapes from her eye.
“Taryn had been told that her character, because of her past, just shuts down when she gets violated,” Vinnecour recalls of shooting that painful scene. “So she was in shutdown mode, and then one tear came out of her eye—it was perfect. I went over to tell her, ‘That was so beautiful!’ but she just said, ‘I am so sorry. I know I’m not supposed to have an emotion. It just came out!’ ” Vinnecour creates a safety bubble for the actresses that allows them to make themselves vulnerable. That means clearing the set for sensitive sex scenes and keeping an eye on how the women’s bodies look, so they won’t feel self-conscious.
Kohan says, “The biggest problem we have with being graphic [on the show] is actors balking at it. I understand, they are the ones who are vulnerable and who are being freeze-framed and used for masturbation fodder! But I keep trying to push it, because our sexual drives aren’t deviant; they are human.”
At Litchfield, Piper is reunited with her drug-smuggling college girlfriend, Alex (Laura Prepon), and the charged sexual liaisons between these conventionally attractive women (in supply closets and showers) became fantasy fodder for Orange Is the New Black fans of all genders. Sometimes sex is played for laughs, as when butch lesbian Boo (Lea DeLaria) challenges Nicky to see who can seduce the most inmates. Other times, it carries heavy emotional weight, as when Poussey (Samira Wiley) tries to kindle a romantic relationship with her resolutely straight best friend, Taystee. After a failed attempt at a kiss between them, Taystee offers, “Maybe we could cuddle for a minute?” They lie silently spooning, a look of restrained misery on Poussey’s face. And then, of course, there is sex with a power differential, between inmates and jailers, whether forced (as with Doggett) or chosen (as between a young inmate impregnated by a romantic guard). Kohan creates a microcosm of the outside world, with all the tiny pleasures and social horrors played out in captivity.
Vaginas come up as a topic in the writers’ room “approximately 62 times a day,” Orange writer Lauren Morelli has written—“much to the chagrin” of the staff’s handful of male writers. Unlike Weeds’s mostly masculine lineup, Orange’s room was female-dominated from the start.
Kohan coaxed the writers to share the intimate details of their lives, and Morelli realized, while writing about and discussing Piper’s sexuality in season one, that she herself was gay. “In Piper and Alex, I’d found a mouthpiece for my own desires and a glimmer of what my future could look like,” she wrote in a 2015 essay for Mic. She left her husband and began a relationship with one of the show’s stars, Samira “Poussey” Wiley. In 2017, the two women got married.
Working on a show with not just a mostly female cast but also a mostly female crew was a disorienting and novel experience for many involved. “I really had to abandon this idea I had that I’m the kind of girl that doesn’t really get along with girls,” Natasha Lyonne says, laughing. “It’s a very interesting case study, because there are so many of us and we’re all different, and yet there is enough space for all of us.” Lisa Vinnecour similarly marvels at Orange’s unprecedented femaleness: “You look around, and the amount of women sitting on set at any given moment, on camera and off—it’s epic.” She recalls looking around Video Village at a certain point during the production of season four: “Every single person—hair, makeup, wardrobe, lighting, script—was a woman.”
Yet imbalances persist. One enduring sore point for Kohan is pay disparities in the entertainment industry, with men at the same level of their careers as she is earning significantly more. “I am sick of not getting paid as much as I think I should’ve been for many, many years—particularly on Weeds,” Kohan tells me. “It was just embarrassing, and it remains a thorn in my side.” The only recourse for women, she says, is threatening to walk and being prepared to follow through, as Amy Sherman-Palladino unsuccessfully did on Gilmore Girls. “Ultimately, it comes down to: Are you willing to kill the baby? Maybe it’s harder for women to do that, but it’s really the only power you have.”
Kohan admits that she has often chosen creative license over money. With Orange, that meant the luxury to conjure up a cornucopia of female characters, probably employing more women of color in major speaking roles than all the non-Shondaland network prime-time shows combined. That was evident when the enormous ensemble gathered onstage to collectively accept their 2015 Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Ensemble: crowded around Uzo Aduba, who gripped the statuette, was a collection of women right out of a “United Colors of Benetton” ad, beaming and hugging one another in disbelief.
Yet the show’s treatment of race set off alarm bells for some critics. In the Nation, Aura Bogado argued that Orange was just the latest instance of white people exploiting the suffering of African Americans. Putting Piper and her white-girl problems at the center of the first season didn’t help shore up the show’s racial dynamics. Over the following seasons, though, Kohan and her writers opened up the Orange universe: racial caricatures often deepened into compelling characters who wielded stereotypical behavior mostly as a shield or a taunt. Black Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore), for example, starts out as a sassy quip machine, but by the third season, she’s an idiosyncratic wonder. What started as a passing joke about being Jewish (so she can get the better-quality kosher food in the cafeteria) grows serious as she begins to study Judaism in order to convince the prison rabbi she is sincere. The religion’s constant self-reflection appeals to her: “If you do something wrong, you got to figure it out yourself. And as far as God’s concerned, it’s your job to keep asking questions and to keep learning and to keep arguing.” She cries when the rabbi agrees to her conversion. The final step, a mikvah (a ritual immersion in water), is completed during a spontaneous prison break after inmates notice a gap in the fence. Cindy jumps into the forbidden lake outside the prison and, for a moment, floats blissfully.
The tone of the series has grown bleaker over the years. In season one, “there were moments that felt too light, too frivolous,” says writer Sian Heder, as if the women were bunkmates at summer camp. “Often, I would write a super-intense scene, and Jenji would write what she called a funny ‘treacle cutter’ at the end of it. And at first, I was like, ‘God, we can’t just let anything land without a joke?’ But what it gave us was the idea that there is no moment so intense that you can’t laugh in that moment, truly.”
Increasingly, Orange has interspersed that humor with glimpses of the oppressive machinery behind the prison industrial complex. Most of the women at Litchfield committed relatively minor crimes out of desperation, habit, or foolishness, yet the prison embroils inmates in bullshit schemes, such as a mock job fair, rather than actually training them or helping them get work that pays a living wage when they return to the outside world. Things grow more harrowing still when Litchfield’s management is taken over by a private corporation called MCC, whose sole interest is in making money. The new regime of cost cutting and profit making results in dangerous overcrowding; an influx of brutal, barely trained guards; and a general breakdown in the fabric of prison life. As one inmate notes, “We ain’t people now; we bulk items.”
Kohan couldn’t resist having a little fun with the situation, sending Caputo to CorrectiCon, a dystopian prison-management convention featuring panels with titles such as “Shanks for the Memories: A History of Prison Weapons.” But, in season four, that satire was set against a dire, serious portrait of disintegrating prison conditions. Sophia is thrown into the chasm of solitary confinement, aka the SHU, for her own “protection.” Litchfield’s racial factions, which coexisted somewhat peacefully in previous seasons, grow treacherously polarized (and more broadly drawn) as a new population of hardened prisoners pours into the prison. Piper, who has developed a black-market business selling aromatically infused panties worn by her fellow convicts, allies herself with a newly arrived bunch of neo-Nazi women to shore up her power against competition from a rival Dominican gang. After she rats on the Dominicans to prison guards, they retaliate by branding her arm with a swastika.
“The animals, the animals / trapped trapped trapped till the cage is full”—that’s how every episode of Orange opens, with Regina Spektor’s propulsive theme song. In the season-four episode that takes “The Animals” as its title—directed by Kohan’s friend, Mad Men creator Matt Weiner—the inmates stage a nonviolent but chaotic protest in the prison’s canteen against Litchfield’s increasingly inhumane policies. The implicit message is “We are not animals.” But the canteen becomes a killing floor when Poussey, one of Orange’s most beloved personalities, perishes at the hands of a poorly trained, panicked corrections officer.
“I can’t breathe” are her last words, a deliberate echo of those of Eric Garner, whose death at the hands of police helped catalyze the Black Lives Matter movement. The guards leave her corpse lying for hours in the cafeteria—just as the Ferguson police did with Michael Brown after he was shot down in the street—while they pull together a cover story. Speaking to the press, Caputo treats the death as a generic occurrence. Taystee, incandescent with grief and rage, shouts, “They didn’t even say her name!”—a rallying cry in the aftermath of Sandra Bland’s unexplained death in a jail cell.
Fractious debates had erupted in the writers’ room about which character should die. Kohan felt strongly that they needed to choose Poussey precisely because she was such an endearing, sensitive, and optimistic figure: “She had a future, she had potential, and that is going to be more devastating than losing other characters.” Natasha Lyonne compared the epic nature of filming that scene to Spartacus, such was the intense coordination and rehearsal required. The entire cast was on set, a massive ensemble simulating chaos. “It has to feel like . . . it’s an accident,” Matt Weiner pointed out to Vanity Fair. “But, of course, the whole story of the episode is that nothing is an accident. This entire environment has been created because of the corporatization of the prison.”
Actress Samira Wiley ran around between takes trying to cheer up castmates traumatized by her brutal on-screen demise. After the fourth season premiered in June 2016, many equally distraught fans protested with the hashtag #PousseyDeservedBetter. “Disgusting how you could do this to the one beautiful, strong and (finally) happy black lesbian character,” one fan complained on Twitter. Others were disturbed by the show’s decision to include a sympathetic flashback for the young white corrections officer who killed Poussey, a move that seemed to diminish the guard’s culpability for this senseless death.
“There’s something too facile about ‘The evil guard kills the good prisoner,’ ” Kohan argues. “It’s messier than that. They are all people, and they are all making mistakes and acting in the moment. There’s that tension of: Are you the actions you commit? Are you separate from those? I don’t want the easy way out. I want people to struggle with the material and argue with it and be affected by it.”
Wiley herself told reporters she felt proud to contribute to this consciousness-raising moment: “Some people who love Orange Is the New Black don’t know what Black Lives Matter is. They don’t have a black friend and they don’t have a gay friend, but they know Poussey from TV and they feel just like you said—you feel like you knew her.” In a conversation about the show at the political website ThinkProgress, criminal-justice reporter Carimah Townes argued that the season’s narrative was ultimately deeply resonant: “This is the black women’s ‘We have nothing to lose but our chains’ moment. And the story line is so timely. There are prison protests (labor and hunger strikes) happening all over the country, with people saying, ‘Enough is enough’ with slave labor, solitary confinement, and inhumane living conditions.”
Kohan is well aware that Orange offers her a privileged cultural perch. “A huge part of my goal for the show is to start conversations about things,” she told a live audience in 2014. “It is, to a certain extent, my soapbox—I’m not secretive about my political agenda. It’s great that the themes of the show have entered the national conversation and international conversation, and that people are talking about issues that they were never talking about before, and seeing the prison industrial complex in a different light and seeing prisoners in a different light.”
The private penitentiary industry flourished in the early years of the twenty-first century, but there were signs of shifting attitudes. Hillary Clinton had called for an end to the for-profit prison sector, and in August 2016, two months after season four of Orange premiered, President Obama’s Justice Department announced that it would begin phasing out its contracts with corporate prisons. A month later, one of the largest jail strikes in US history erupted all across the country: at least twenty thousand inmates from twenty-three states refused to report for their prison jobs, which paid them little or nothing. “A call to action against slavery in America,” the organizers dubbed the strike, whose demands included fair pay, improved living conditions, and better educational opportunities.
“People are realizing that, okay, we might have made a bit of a mistake here with the war on drugs, that it was really a war on people,” says executive producer Mark Burley. “Mass incarceration is now seen as a failure and an expensive one at that . . . and it doesn’t hurt that people are watching a television show that humanizes those people.” Just as Weeds might have helped changed attitudes toward legalizing marijuana a bit, Orange humanized the prison population—though, with the election of Donald Trump, federal policy on marijuana prosecution and private prisons is moving violently in reverse, back to the bad old days of “just say no” and mandatory minimum sentencing.
Struggling to think of a television series with comparable ambition and breadth, Natasha Lyonne settles on The Wire. David Simon’s show circled Baltimore, stealthily building a stratum-by-stratum geological mapping of an urban landscape of corruption and inequality, tracing the economic pressure points and social fissures that have created an effectively symbiotic arrangement in which drug gangs and police forces have an interest in things staying the same. Crack-empire kingpins, young street dealers, cops, politicians, defense lawyers, prosecutors, and even journalists and teachers—all are implicated in a system that perpetuates itself even as it keeps on failing.
“The scope keeps growing, and suddenly you’re telling me the entire story of the universe of drugs and the impact that it has,” Lyonne says of The Wire. “It feels like that is what is happening with our show.” Orange weaves together the stories of individual women with the systemic dysfunction of the prison industrial complex, the justice system, and society’s frayed safety net. “We are starting to flesh it all out and see the entire story of what it’s like being in prison.”
The writers’ room of Orange Is the New Black feels like preschool, stocked with toys (clay, coloring books, puzzles) so that people can keep their bodies and brains engaged, even when they’re delving into uncomfortable emotional territory. It’s not easy to keep dozens of narrative threads in motion, and Kohan uses a delicate balance of collaboration and discipline to keep things heading in the right direction. “There is a control freak side to me,” she says, laughing. “I’m not trying to change things just to pee in the corner but to keep the tone of the show constant.”
Stephen Falk, who went on to create the series You’re the Worst after working on both Weeds and Orange, declares Kohan to be the bravest storyteller he knows. “She has no fear of putting the most dramatic thing up against the most comedic. That’s a lesson I have taken from her and used to fortify my timid little heart when I get nervous about doing something.” The two take frequent walks around the Silver Lake Reservoir, during which he continues to absorb her advice and admire the way she speaks truth to Hollywood power. “By being very unafraid to stand her ground, she can sometimes put executives off balance. She is unafraid to piss off the powers that be”—or to burn down the town, for that matter.
In Weeds, Kohan set out to create a mesmerizing woman who could stand alongside Tony Soprano. With Orange, she went one step further: In a show with no fixed center, men are mostly pushed to the margins. It’s the women who take up emotional space within the walls of Litchfield. Joy, misery, humor, rage, jealousy, mischief, lust—nearly all of it is aimed at and reciprocated by other female characters, in defiance of or to evade the men who would restrain them. All that matters is women talking and laughing and telling one another stories.
Kohan says she approached Weeds with the old sitcom attitude that people don’t change: “There is no growth or epiphanies. On Weeds, everyone just becomes more and more of who they are.” On Orange Is the New Black, though, a completely different mind-set was required. In this least promising of environments, characters grow emotionally and forge unexpected alliances across seemingly unbridgeable chasms of race and class and sexuality. Human potential flowers against all odds.
“These women in prison, as a group—they are just lumped together and charged and treated accordingly,” Kohan says. “It was a real opportunity to say, ‘Take another look! There is more to this person than what crime they committed.’ The more you dig, the more you find. So we just keep digging.”