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To some extent I still stand by that assessment.
For much of the later run of the series, it was a real weakness.
The show has always tracked the bigger conversations about incarceration as theyve shifted over the last decade.
With new reporting about the horrors of private prisons,OITNBintroduced a new private company to run Litchfield.
But the original setup of the first season has now been inverted.
Pipers the one living on the outside, struggling with how to feel connected to her partner.
Those shifts dont dramatically change the large Piper sections of the season.
The rest of the show, meanwhile, tells some of the seasons most brutal, emotionally affecting stories.
There are tragic ends for some inmates, and redemptive ones for others.
Almost all of them feel, if not inevitable, then still plausible, still grounded, still purposeful.
It feels inevitable, and awful.
The chickens have been flattened into a very direct analogy, obvious stand-ins for theories about the carceral state.
Theres less of the distraction and circumlocution of earlier seasons of the show, less of the surreal strangeness.
Its been stripped of nuance.
For many shows that might be a criticism.
