When the first episode of your new show begins with a lesbian love scene, you know it’ll be an instant Hollywood and media hit.
“Orange Is the New Black,” just released as a Netflix webseries, is a raunchy dramedy about an educated white, ex-lesbian woman who gets involved with a drug ring and spends 15 months in a women’s prison. Judging from the first few episodes, the series promises to be chock-full of lesbian sex, nudity, druggies, transgenders and other decidedly tasteless content. And liberals in the media are lapping it up.
Based on the real-life experiences of Piper Kerman, the racy series was directed by Jenji Kohan, creator of the pot-glorifying show “Weeds.” After the July 11 premiere, it wasn’t long before lefty media were head over heels in love with it, from it’s “catchy as hell” title song [1] (as radical feminist site Jezebel’s Laura Beck described it) to its perverse and graphic subject matter.
“You’ve gotta binge on the new Netflix series,” urged Daily Beast’s Andrew Romano, who hailed the show [2] as “the best thing on TV right now.” The Hollywood Reporter declared [3] the show “astounded” audiences and praised it as “brilliant” and “impressive,” while Slate gushed [4]that it was “so fresh” and “genuinely moving.”
Salon.com’s Willa Paskin took up the fanfare [5], lauding the show as “awesome, original,” and hyperventilating over the “wildly entertaining” show’s cast of characters, which include “a transgendered former fireman, a crazy Jesus freak, a nun and many, many more.” Describing the show as “really gay and really delightful,” Paskin concluded: “It’s a great show – I’m going back to watching now.” The Washington Post jumped on the bandwagon, [6] calling the show “brilliance behind bars,” while noting that it is “full of gross and intentionally unsettling moments.”
Glorifying lurid immorality is about as much as you could expect from director Jenji Kohan, who’s “Weeds” turned the glamor light on a marijuana-dealing mom [7]. When asked in an interview [8]about the new prison series which “stakes its claim as one that refuses to conform to conservative ideas of sexuality,” Kohan replied, “The one thing I always stress is I want to see more f–king and sex,” before adding an endorsement for what she called “amateur porn.”
Graphic sexual perversity is nothing new to Hollywood, especially TV [9], but it’s leaking into more and more on-demand, web-streaming media. Maybe “Orange Is the New Black,” but prison pothead lesbian sex scenes straight-to-your-living-room sounds like a new low.
Editor's note: At publication this article mistakenly identified the author as Piper Chapman instead of Piper Kerman. The character's name is Piper Chapman.