It’s unusual for a television series to feature a single interesting female character, let alone a plethora of them the way Orange does. I can’t stress enough how rare this is, and how great it is to see a female-driven ensemble show executed this well. There are even more incredible characters that I haven’t even mentioned yet that contribute to this cavalcade of crazy making up the Litchfield prison environment. There’s Yoga Jones, who I almost mistook for Edie Falco, but is an amusing character until we hear her heartbreaking story. Crazy Eyes is full of surprises, some crazy and some oddly poignant. Taystee has some of the show’s best one-liners. One of my favorites might be Boo, a large lesbian inmate who takes on wives and adopts pets and is, hands down, the best dancer in the prison. She is so much fun in every scene she’s in.
And it’s not just that all these females are features, and are quirky, or whatever. It’s that they feel like real people, who have had real experiences and are products of those experiences. As the show progresses we learn more and more about the experiences that shaped them and led them to Litchfield, and every single one offers insight into exactly why the character is the person they are, and why they act the way they do in prison, and the flashbacks routinely subvert what we thought we knew about each individual. So it’s not their mere presence and oddities but the depth of the development and expression and feeling behind these women that makes them all so valuable, and that extends to the entirety of Orange is the New Black as a valuable show.
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