Why Orange is the New Black has the best dialogue on TV

(Image credit: Netflix)

published 24 June 2016

This moment in television history is notable for the fact that dozens of great critics and millions of great fans are reviewing the latest TV show at the same time. If you write about culture, this is a comfort. Take this week: The fourth season of Orange is the New Black premiered June 17 on Netflix and this — right here, at this point in the paragraph — is where I'd normally describe it as "gut-wrenching" and "trenchant" while hating this sentence a little for all it can't say. This season of Orange is the New Black is those things; the trouble is, it's also funny. Like, Oscar Wilde funny. Language-you-keep-coming-back-to funny. This, given the heft of this season, is hard to adequately explain.

Luckily, there are terrific essays all over the place (here and here and here, for starters) about the show's careful treatment of consent, the psychology of rape survivors, drug addiction, and the issues that plague inmates who happen to be trans. There are appreciations for the boldness with which it tackles racism while humanizing skinheads (and rape while humanizing rapists). Above all, Orange is the New Black is praised for anatomizing the horror and banal evil of the dysfunctional American prison system — something it does so thoroughly, it's basically its own thinkpiece.

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The trouble with a show that's so strong at comedy and tragedy is that the drama dominates. This makes a certain kind of sense: We're far more affected by tragedy, and it seems unfeeling to praise a joke's construction when there are enormous moral consequences to events shown onscreen. (The perfect comedy will never win an Oscar if there's a Holocaust film.) Because Orange is the New Black is both, because its tragic side is so heartrendingly effective, its comedic dimension gets a little obscured. It becomes hard to talk about.

The challenge of any comedy is how to get its people together. Great sitcoms are built around a basic constraint: A group of characters are stuck with each other, often when they don't want to be. Whether it's in a bar, a single-family home, a workplace, or an apartment complex, the ideal situation allows for boredom and the kinds of shoot-the-shit exchanges that simply don't happen if people are completely free to move about their days.

Not to give too much away, but there is no story to tell about the final episode. This is one of its crises. Introduce an event so terrible language cannot address it and the sense of loss mounts. But these last episodes are able to weaponize noise and silence because the rest of the season used language and comedy so effectively. The inmates use words to build their lives. Joking, in their context, can seem like all there is to life. Failing jokes, words:

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Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.

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