If you read my writing, you know that I'm not a confrontational writer. When I say I don't like something, I hedge my writing carefully, and hopefully I don't make anyone who disagrees with me angry.
But I have some real problems with Orange is the New Black. I think I just finished the 11th episode of the first season. My wife likes the show more than I do, and has gotten sucked into the cliffhanger aspects of the stories. I probably could have quit after one episode.
I've got lots of problems with the show, but probably because it has the potential to be very good. There are some great elements to the stories. The writing sparkles. It's a tour-de-force.
1. The show is overwritten. Most of the characters are just way too witty. I have this problem with a lot of TV and movies, but mostly with modern ones. Wit is a tricky thing. I find it really annoying when everything being said is one clever remark after another. Most people are not that clever, and it seems unbelievable to have characters like that. There are exceptions to this rule. (I watched The Big Lebowski last night, and that's an example of how to do it right - by creating a heightened reality, it allows all of the characters to be fantastic.)
2. The characters are inconsistent. This has been a weird issue for me, but the writers seem to think they're writing multifaceted characters, when they actually are just adjusting the personalities to fit. The primary example of this has been Crazy Eyes, who started off as a creepy stalker, adjusted to be a literary and well-in-control inmate, to having a nice moment with Chapman during this last episode.
3. While I can't speak to how these people would be on the outside, or even to the specific pressures of being inside, I have a hard time believing that people would behave in certain ways. Starting with the first couple episodes, Red starving Chapman for "insulting" her food. The authorities know, but choose not to interfere. There's a big difference between Red penalizing Chapman by forcing her to skip one meal, and refusing to feed her for several meals. This is something that the institution would take issue with.
4. I'm not a doctor, obviously, but I believe that the death of an inmate from an overdose compared to the body from a suicide by hanging would result in different corpses. The show covered this up pretty well, but it still made some annoyed groans from me.
5. Chapman, as a protagonist, is really not a likable character. It's not her fluid sexuality, either. It's that she spends so much time in the series talking about how these people aren't bad, how it's just a matter of a bad choice catching up, etc. Then she proceeds to make bad choice after bad choice. Her making the decision to go back to Alex is just bizarre. She seems to do it out of a desire to get even with Healy for putting her in SHU. And I can just imagine that once she gets out of prison, she would realize that it was a terrible decision, then she'd defend that bad choice by saying something like "you weren't there!"
