There’s no way to have this conversation without discussing events that take place at the end of Orange Is the New Black’s fourth season so be aware that we’re going to be discussing massive spoilers below.
In the penultimate episode of the fourth season of Orange Is the New Black, the most shocking and sad death in a show that has had quite a few occurs. What begins as a peaceful protest by the inmates at Litchfield Penitentiary turns ugly when the overly-aggressive (mostly white male) guards start physically-accosting some of them. When Suzanne, a.k.a. Crazy Eyes, starts to panic, her diminutive friend Poussey tries to calm her down but gets tackled and held down by inexperienced guard Baxter Bayley. In the ensuing struggle, Poussey suffocates under a distracted Bayley’s knee and is accidentally killed.
There is no misjudging the metaphor here. Hell, it’s barely a metaphor. An African-American woman is unjustly impeded by a white figure of authority acting more out of fear than a sense of justice and she pays for it with her life. It has elements of Eric Gardner and Freddie Grey and Sandra Bland and god knows how many other unecessary deaths at the hands of law enforcement officials.
In the season finale, we watch horrified as the prison guards and the corporation that owns the prison scramble to concote a cover-up in order to deflect blame and make it seem as though Poussey deserved what she got. While the show continued to pepper in its trademark moments of dark humor and wacky subplots, it was hard to laugh at a disgusting situation that felt all too real. It all comes to a head when the warden, Joe Caputo, a somewhat-likable white man caught between his idealism and his career, decides to sacrifice Poussey’s character in order to save Bayley’s, and the prisoners commence a riot the outcome of which we won’t know until next season.
The fourth season of OITNB premiered on Netflix on June 17, 2016. If it had been broadcast on a television network where one episode is released each week, we’d currently be in the space between episode four and five. While the season as a whole builds animosity between the mostly white people in power and the mostly African-American and Latino prisoners, it’s hard to say if the punch would be felt just yet. But if by some chance the show had been broadcast weekly and the last two episodes of the season just so happened to come out across last week and this week, it might have made for one of the most jarring, poignant, and troubling intersection of real life and pop culture.
On July 5, Baton Rouge police officers responded to an anonymous call about a man bothering customers outside of a convenience store at little after midnight. When they arrived, they found Alton Sterling selling CDs, as he usually did according to the clerk inside. After an altercation, seemingly without the need to, one officer shot Sterling dead.
A day later, Philando Castile was in his car in suburban Minnesota during a routine traffic stop when an officer approached. After telling the officer that he was a licensed gun carrier and that he had a gun in the glove box, Castile told him he was reaching for the wallet in his pocket when the policeman fired several shots into him. His girlfriend, sitting in the passenger seat, immediately started broadcasting the event while her daughter sat in the backseat.
July 9, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas, a sniper opened fire on police officers in the vicinity, killing five and injuring nine others as well as two civilians. The shooter was an African-American war veteran angry over the many instances of white police officer shooting African-Americans in the line of duty and not receiving punishment.
Those three events in succession galvanized our nation and has forced even the most privileged and most distant among us to look at what’s going on. Of course there was bickering as many dug in their heels on preconceived concepts but the Dallas massacre seemed to be some kind of impetus for Americans to really start dealing with the issue.
It’s times like this when art and pop culture can be most affecting. You could make a solid case that the rise in LGBTQ characters on popular TV shows in the 90’s and 00’s had a direct impact on the way the nation’s stance on gay marriage and equality changed. Taking the emotions and the events we’re dealing with and processing them through an artistic filter or through a writer’s pen can help in the way we understand one another and connect in a time when it feels like we’re all so disconnected that it seems impossible.
The most obvious artistry to rise up in the wake of tragic events is song. It’s easy to cobble together heartfelt lyrics and accompanying music and push that out while the tears are still fresh. It’s much harder to do with television and movies since they’re usually created so far in advance, but every so often a story already being told is so prescient that it arrives when we need it most.
Orange Is the New Black creator Jenji Cohen and her writers couldn’t have known just how impactful the ending of season four would be by the July rolled around. As we’ve seen since Netflix and other streaming services started releasing television show seasons all at once, creators have to assume that whatever social impact their show has will be centered around those first couple weeks after it launches and then it’s lost to the never-ending pop culture feeding frenzy.
While audiences certainly love the idea that, if they want to, they can watch the new season of Daredevil or House of Cards in its entirety the same day it’s released, there’s a societal currency that those shows miss out on compared to hit TV programs on channels like HBO or AMC that roll out at the traditional weekly pace.
Take Game of Thrones, for instance. The recent season finale of HBO’s epic fantasy series was such a talking point on social media that fans seemed to make an implied agreement than everyone had a day, maybe two, and then we’re going to talk openly about spoilers no matter what. You’re just gonna have to deal with it because this was so exciting and so impactful that everyone just wanted to converse with one another about it. The fact that most audiences got to watch it at the same time, while interacting with one another on Twitter or Facebook, was an immense boost to this reaction.
On the flip side is Orange Is the New Black, where the season four finale has been sitting there for anyone to discover anytime they want for almost a month now. While there was surely an initial purge of fanatical viewers (Netflix doesn’t release ratings data so we have to assume), the show has likely been more of a trickle watch for most. Netflix themselves even admit that OITNB is caught somewhere in the middle of their “Binge Scale,” which determines how quickly most viewers consume one of their TV programs.
There was no magic moment when OITNB viewers swarmed Twitter with hashtags and memes. There isn’t going to be a day when all of the internet’s entertainment outlets write recaps of the season or thinkpieces about the finale or even GIF posts covering favorite moments. Yes, all of those things have happened and will continue to happen. There will be impact felt from the show’s fallout and it will have the kind of “you have to see this” word of mouth that will keep audiences watching. But it won’t be the same. And it won’t have the impact it could have had if the show were on FX or even Showtime rather than Netflix.
None of this is to say that Netflix’s full season release strategy is a failure and that OITNB would be better off on a traditional network. The show probably only exists because of Netflix and flourishes in this system that rewards quality over ratings. A basic cable network wouldn’t let the show go half as far as it does and a pay cable network might not have stood behind it for so long (Netflix has already renewed the show through season seven).
Rather, it simply highlights a major flaw in the strategy. The modern landscape of entertainment allows for this kind of instant gratification and that’s a good thing. But this modern pop culture world is also often about creating a shared experience like the one we witness anytime something crazy happens on Game of Thrones. That’s lost with Netflix’s model. So is the ability to sustain coverage and top-of-mind thinking for your show. Instead of reminding everyone you exist every week for three months, Netflix’s shows have to bank on that release date for everything. Within a month of release, there usually isn’t much talk about the latest season of their shows. Within two months, it’s old news.
In this case, that stifles the impact of what is a very important and very relevant piece of art. As it stands, only a handful of people are discussing the events that take place at the end of OITNB’s season and juxtaposing it to the events that have transpired in our real lives. It’s a shame because more people would benefit from the exposure it provides and discussion it creates.
