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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. As we've just discussed, many of the issues that led to the current sag after strike involve streaming and fair compensation for streaming actors. Coincidentally, this month also marked the 10th anniversary of one of the foundational shows of the streaming era, proving audiences welcome the concept of binge-watching. That's s the acclaim Netflix Dramedy Orange Is the New Black, which debuted in the summer of 2013, alongside House of Cards, OITNB was one of the first original offerings from the streaming service. Helmed by showrunner Jenji Kohan, and adapted from Piper Kerman's memoir of the same name, the show followed a group of women incarcerated at a fictional New York prison.

Revolutionary for its diverse ensemble cast, depictions of queerness, and a prominent and beloved transgender character, Orange Is the New Black broke new ground and won four Emmys. Time Magazine declared that the series is the most important TV show of the decade. Orange Is the New Black also introduced audiences to relatively unknown actors who are now in demand, booked, and busy artists like Laverne Cox, Danielle Brooks, Uzo Aduba, and Natasha Lyonne. Joining us now to discuss the 10th anniversary of Orange Is the New Black and the legacy of the show is Vulture TV critic, Kathryn VanArendonk. Hey, Kathryn.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Hello.

Alison Stewart: Hey, listeners, we want to hear from you. Did you watch Orange Is the New Black? Was there a favorite character you had or an episode or a season that stands out to you? You can text us at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. That's our number where you can text us your thoughts. It's very interesting when you think about what Netflix was once upon a time. Netflix announced that this fall they will reportedly send out its final DVD. It started as a movie rental company. Let's think about 2013. What was Netflix's profile?

Kathryn VanArendonk: This was the big moment of transition. This is really the moment in time where TV took a sharp turn away from a model that had been basically stable for decades and into this place that we are in now, in which Mo Ryan was discussing with you, has caused a lot of success and a lot of enormous inequity in the last decade. What happened was that Netflix announced that they were going to start creating original programming, and everyone thought, "Huh, that's odd. What is that going to be like?" That they were going to be released in binge units rather than once a week, which everyone then including me, flipped out about because it made a lot about how television works-- It called a lot of it into question. The two series that it launched with were Orange Is the New Black and House of Cards.

I remember opening up Netflix, I remember opening up those programs and just feeling like, "I have no idea what these are about to look like. Are they going to look like dramas as they have been on cable before? Is this an entirely new form of entertainment? Have they completely figured out how to restructure a TV show for a binge-watch rather than weekly viewing?" The answer to a lot of that question was yes and no, and not quite yet, but you could see the seeds of things. Orange Is the New Black was really on the tip of this revolution that we've now been living in for the last decade.

Alison Stewart: What separated it editorially, creatively from other shows that were being offered at the time?

Kathryn VanArendonk: From a structural standpoint, one of the things that I and a lot of other TV critics were really interested in and taken by in the beginning was that it began with this character, Piper Chapman, who is based on Piper Kerman and her life, and was really rooted in that character's story. She was a young woman who was in prison on a drug charge, a young white woman with a fair amount of privilege. Then as the season went on every episode became about the backstory of other incarcerated women, and it really forced viewers to have a completely different sense of how incarceration effects and oppresses women and women of color, women from all different kinds of backgrounds. The structure of that show and the way that it became this huge network of stories rather than one individual character story was really one of the most fascinating and I think important things about how that show worked.

Creatively, it is also just we were coming out of an era, we were still in an era where most of the celebrated prestige television was shows about sad middle-aged men whose jobs or lives had otherwise been disappointing. It was wild, truly wild to just see that many women on set all together all the time. There just was certainly no other show that was able to be as critically acclaimed in a prestige way as Orange Is the New Black was that had that many women. There are a lot of shows that are incredible, shows that really changed television, shows like Gilmore Girls that are Beloved that were about women's lives, but were often in this place where it was like, "Yes, but that's like your mom watches that show. It's kind of nice." Which of course is not by the way any-- We should talk about Gilmore Girls one day and what an intense show that is.

Orange Is the New Black was very much appreciated in that moment of being creatively just on its own plane and also being about women's stories. It was so unusual.

Alison Stewart: Also it was very frank and, matter of fact, about queerness and queer lives. Of course, one of the characters who became a household name from the show was trans actress Laverne Cox, her character Sophia begins the show as a trans woman in prison, and she does hair for the other women in prison. She's a nexus of a lot of different stories. The series show what life was like for her when she was denied her access to her medications. Let's listen to that moment when Sophia confronts the warden. This is from season one of Orange Is the New Black.

Warden: The bottom line is that the prison can no longer provide high-end hormones.

Sophia: If I don't get my medication, I'm going through withdrawal, hot flashes, night sweats, my face will sag, my body hairs will start to grow back.

Warden: We don't need to get into that.

Sophia: Let me explain this for you. When my penis was split in half and inverted, my testes were removed. I don't have any testosterone left to replace the estrogen that you've taken away from me.

Warden: What do you want from me?

Sophia: I want to see a doctor.

Warden: You can't go to the clinic unless it's an emergency.

Sophia: This is an emergency.

Warden: We don't see it that way.

Alison Stewart: What was revolutionary about Sophia's character?

Kathryn VanArendonk: There were so few trans characters of any kind on television. Often when trans characters did appear on tv, it was for a one-episode arc. It was somebody who stumbles into an emergency room and then doctors are surprised to discover that they're trans. I remember stories like that from ER, from all kinds of police procedurals, and they would often be trans characters who would come and go. They were brief, exotic oddities. This was a very, very, very different reality. For one thing, Sophia was a series regular and she was beloved and she was a part of a community.

It was not this exotic oddity who was outside of the standard status quo of a show. The other thing is that when a trans character is part of a community and part of a show for a longer period of time, what you see is the lived reality of what it is like to be a trans person, which included in that clip what happens if you are incarcerated and you do not have access to the hormones that you need, the healthcare that you need and how other characters react to her, how she feels about other people. She was allowed to be a person instead of a one-off plot line. There was so, so few that was transparent and there was Orange Is the New Black. Those were really the only shows that had anything like that level of trans representation at that point.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Kathryn VanArendonk, Vulture TV critic. We're talking about the 10th anniversary of Orange Is the New Black. When you think about the actors that we have come to know and love, some we had known before. Natasha Lyonne, her career was reignited. We also got to know new actors or actors who were-- I guess Uzo Aduba said she was getting ready to quit acting before Orange Is the New Black. She went on to win two Emmy's. We've seen her on Broadway. Her character, she played Crazy Eyes, whose name was Suzanne, who had such a fascinating backstory. Two-part question. One, how did you feel about the way the show dealt with Suzanne's mental illness, and also the use of flashbacks in the show? Because that's how we got to know more about how Suzanne got to where she is.

Kathryn VanArendonk: This was an issue that appeared throughout Orange Is the New Black and is always an issue when we talk about shows that tend to be new or revolutionary, or in some unfamiliar space in culture, they tend to get made by people who want to do the best they can by these characters, but who are inevitably not yet fully staffed or understanding the full representational issues that somebody who has mental illness or trans character, queer characters might necessarily have wanted say in the upper-level creative control of those shows. It always feels to me like shows that are really on the cutting edge of cultural representation do a ton of good and then also tend to have a lot of missteps or elements of them that are just not fully formed yet.

Crazy Eyes was certainly one of them. She played this character who had mental illness and who was often treated by other characters in the show, and by the show itself in a way that really diminished her as a person that tended to suggest that she wasn't worth considering on the same level as the other characters. Sometimes she was comic relief, sometimes she was this burst of violence that everyone was frightened by. Then yes, over the course of the show and through flashbacks, you understand more about who she is and how she got to this point. We the audience are able to understand something different about her that her fellow incarcerated community could not understand. Does that make it better? I am not sure but it was a show that was always-- It had a lot of these tensions inside of it.

Alison Stewart: Before I let you go, in the last few days, there's been a lot of pieces celebrating the series but there's also a piece of The New Yorker by Michael Schulman that recounts how many of the actors feel they weren't fairly compensated for their work on such a popular series. Obviously, we're talking about the SAG strike, we even got a text saying, "Is promoting Orange Is the New Black crossing the digital picket line here by promoting a show produced by a SAG employer? Feels iffy." When you think about what does that piece reveal about the Netflix model and how it pays its actors? How does this factor into our conversation with the writers' strike? We got about a minute or so.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Sure. Michael Schulman's piece which I very much recommend that you read is all about the way that the same Netflix model that was able to create this television revolution over the last 10 years, similarly enabled it to vastly underpay and undersupport its cast members in particular. The piece opens with an anecdote of a TikTok by cast member Kimiko Glenn, who is looking over her residuals and all of these episodes in TV that she was a crucial character in, and then she gets $27.30, which is just-- It is absolutely absurd. Part of the reason that it is important to continue to talk about shows which criticisms does not fall under the SAG strike picket lines, by the way, but there is some confusion about that.

Part of the reason it's really important to continue to talk about these shows is to hold both sides of their legacy together, to celebrate this show for all of the things that it has been able to do and the way that it changed the TV landscape for the better and all of the ways that it failed the people who made that show and the ways that we cannot leave that part of it behind and really have to address the inequalities in this economy.

Alison Stewart: Kathryn VanArendonk is Vulture's TV critic. We've been talking about the 10th anniversary of Orange Is the New Black. Kathryn, thanks for the time.

Kathryn VanArendonk: Thanks so much.

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Alison Stewart: You're listening to All of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue our recognition of the 10th anniversary of the TV series Orange Is the New Black by speaking to the author and activist who lent her life story to the project. Piper Kerman's memoir, Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison tells the story of how as a 24-year-old Piper became part of a drug smuggling scheme run by her ex. Years later Piper was convicted for her involvement and spent a year at a women's Correctional Facility in Danbury, Connecticut. Her memoir served as the basis for the Emmy-winning TV show and Piper was a consultant on the project. After being released, Piper has become a prison reform advocate serving on the board of directors for the Women's Prison Association and the advisory board of the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship. It is so nice to meet you, Piper.

Piper Kerman: Hi, Alison, thank you so much.

Alison Stewart: When you were first approached about adapting your memoir for a TV show, what did you let the folks in charge know had to be included in the show? What was a hard yes? Then what was something you wanted to make sure was not included in the show? Something that was a hard no.

Piper Kerman: The origin of the show is Jenji Kohan been given my book by a close friend of hers who said, "You really need to read this." My meeting with Jenji where trying to figure out if this was a relationship that would work was really inspiring to me because it was fueled by her curiosity. Jenji didn't pitch me. She wasn't like, "Here's how I see it. She asked me question after question after question. Questions about "Psychologically, how do you navigate a prison sentence? Wait, wait, wait, is there cheese in prison?" From the most metaphysical to the most nitty-gritty of how do you get by day to day? For me, that was a strong indication that she was the right person to do the adaptation. I didn't have creative control.

I was a consultant on the show, but I did not have-- I seeded creative control which is a really frightening thing to do for any writer of any format, but certainly for a memoirist. I feel like I entrusted the right person because I think that Jenji, and also some of the people that she partnered with behind the scenes, the executive at Netflix at that time was Cindy Holland, who really shepherded the show through. She is no longer at Netflix, but she was really responsible for some of the very first establishing series that made Netflix what it is today. I was really grateful to have put a memoir about mass incarceration into the hands of Hollywood people like Jenji Kohan comes from a Hollywood family of screenwriters. I was fortunate, but I made a considered gamble on that one.

Alison Stewart: What do you think is the reason that the show resonated with so many people? As to our previous conversation, these were characters people had not seen on television before. This was a subject matter that entertainment didn't necessarily tackle in the most honest or candid way.

Piper Kerman: I think this is the brilliance of Jinji's creative choices in terms of how she made the adaptation structurally and emotionally. It makes perfect sense to me that this show would be not about an individual protagonist like Walter White or Tony Soprano, some of these other prestige series that we were accustomed to seeing, but rather about this remarkable community of women. We don't think about incarcerated people as having a community but they do. We do. That's how you navigate and survive the traumas of incarceration is by forging some form of community. Obviously, I've met thousands and thousands of fans of the show in the last 10 years and there's someone on that show that any viewer can relate to on some level, because their experiences mirror those or because the person reminds them of someone near and dear in their life, their sister, their brother.

Obviously, there are all kinds of different actors on the show. I think that's at the heart of it. The reason that not just in the United States where mass incarceration hopefully is top of mind for many people, but around the world, people found someone on that show that they could root for, and of course, because we're talking about incarcerated people that flips things on its head. We are not accustomed to rooting for people who are labeled as criminals, as felons, as all these words we use to dehumanize the people we lock away, and yet the show creates that tension. I think tension, friction, conflict is one of the things that makes for great and amazing television. Believe me, a prisoner in jail has almost nothing but conflict going on.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Piper Kerman activist and author of Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison. You have been so much on the forefront of advocacy for incarcerated people and raising awareness about their lives and what they face when they get out of prison. What has been one of your biggest, most important things that you want to focus on and have been focusing on when it comes to prison reform?

Piper Kerman: The name of the game is to have fewer people go into the system in the first place. When I say the system, I don't only mean incarceration, though certainly, we should do everything we can possibly do to divert people out from jail or from prison because the experience of prison or jail by design is so traumatizing that people return home already having gone in with challenges and burdens, additionally limited from rejoining the community in a way that we would want. The criminal legal system does not impact a blonde, blue-eyed, middle-class white woman like me the way that it impacts poor people.

Especially disproportionately people of color and that's the way the system is really designed and intended. Everyone likes to say that the system is broken, but the system is here to serve the interests of the moneyed and the few, which is why some of the issues that we're talking about now with the actors and the writers' strike are so ironic and people really should read The New Yorker article that has just come out from Michael, I think it's Schulman-

Alison Stewart: Schulman, yes.

Piper Kerman: -because it really does a beautiful job of using the show, the beloved characters of the show to pinpoint-- When we think about people like Lea DeLaria, Diane Guerrero, Kimiko Glenn are really big characters on the show and to understand that the system was never really fair in its distribution of the wealth that these corporations reap but actually in the streaming era, it's become even more unfair to working actors like that, but these are beloved characters and I really hope that people who are outside of the industry can perhaps read that article and understand because these are characters and actors that we care about and that we love, why the things that the writers and the actors are fighting for are so important and not just in the entertainment industry obviously. This applies to broader questions throughout society.

Alison Stewart: To your point, the system in Hollywood, the system within the criminal justice system, the system within medicine. The system.

Piper Kerman: Exactly, but the criminal legal system brings us back to this question of the power of the state to literally take the liberty and even the life of the citizens. The fact that we allow that to happen to some people and that it's so unusual for it to happen to someone like me was part of the gist of the drive to write the memoir because I knew that I would gain more platform, frankly, than many of the women who I stood shoulder to shoulder to when I was wearing a prison uniform. I'm really grateful that the book found readers like Jenji Kohan and that the show found so many viewers. I do believe that the conversation around mass incarceration has shifted and changed quite a bit in the United States. The system has not necessarily changed that much.

Some states like New York actually have done a fairly successful job at reducing their state prison populations far more than many other states but overall, and certainly for people who are in New York City who are seeing the issues around policing and these questions around what will make us a safe community and what won't, many of the issues that are raised in the memoir, that are raised in the show are still very present in the lives of all of us but some more than others.

Alison Stewart: Obviously, this is based on your book, this conversation. If there's one book you would suggest people read so they could understand more about prison reform and about some of the challenges, what would that be?

Piper Kerman: Oh, my goodness. Susan Burton's book, which is called Becoming Ms. Burton, is an amazing memoir as well. Susan Burton, like me, was incarcerated, but she was in and out of the system for much longer. Susan is in LA at a certain point. Safe and stable housing is one of the number one reasons that people end up in the criminal system in the first place, a lack of safe and stable housing, and particularly women because women have concerns around the safety of their children, concerns around domestic violence. Again, when I say safe and stable housing, it's important. Susan got out of prison, got on her feet with help from others. There was not a single halfway house just for women in the city of Los Angeles and she started a place called A New Way of Life.

Her memoir, Becoming Ms. Burton, is an amazing, amazing story but also an incredibly illuminating picture of what the challenges are and what the solutions are. Organizations right here in New York like the Women's Prison Association where I sit on the board providing safe and stable housing and all the other things that women need to get on their feet is a fundamental part of what we do. That's literally what we do there.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Piper Kerman: That's what's needed everywhere.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for that work that you do. Piper Kerman, thank you so much for making time today.

Piper Kerman: Thanks for talking about Orange Is the New Black.

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