Orange Is the New Black celebrated diverse women. It also exploited their stories.

When Orange Is the New Black debuted in 2013, it was celebrated for its diversity. Its cast was filled with actors of color, it depicted many facets of the LGBTQ spectrum, and it featured actors of all body types without reducing any of them to punchlines.

Creator Jenji Kohan described Piper Chapman, the white woman who began the show as Orange Is the New Black’s main character, as her “Trojan horse” — a way to get a show on the air (because “white lady goes to prison” was an arc that was easier to sell to mostly white TV executives), so Kohan and her writers could immediately start telling stories that weren’t about white, straight, cis people. (And it’s worth noting here that Piper herself is bisexual, and her great love affair in the show was with another woman.)

But most of the critics (including me) praising the show for its diversity were also white. The longer Orange Is the New Black ran, the more it was criticized by many critics of color for how it repurposed very real tragedies and traumas faced by communities of color for stories both written by and targeted to white liberals.

Few doubted the show had good intentions in its hopes of telling stories about broader, more diverse experiences, but some argued that its good intentions nevertheless resulted in exploitative television that turned marginalized people’s struggles into just another storytelling point. And given that Orange Is the New Black’s writing staff across all seasons was almost entirely white, that criticism had more teeth than it might have on a show with more diverse representation behind the scenes.

One of the most persuasive criticisms of the show’s exploitative qualities came from the writer and critic Ashley Ray-Harris, who has criticized the series for failing to tell nuanced stories about its characters of color. Now that the show is at an end and we can get a better sense of its overall message, I’ve asked Ray-Harris to talk out Orange Is the New Black with me, to examine and interrogate the show’s final season and its ultimate legacy.

Emily VanDerWerff: Before we dive into the final season, I’d love to hear what you consider to be Orange Is the New Black’s biggest failures in how it treated its characters of color.

Ashley Ray-Harris: It’s easy to start with a big moment like Poussey’s death at the hands of a prison guard. This shocking moment at the end of season four wasn’t just sad — it was visceral. Like Eric Garner, Poussey was choked to death following a sit-in protest against prison conditions. When she attempted to calm Suzanne, a guard believed she was trying to attack him and pinned her down. It slowly became clear that she couldn’t breathe.

That moment was the most clear-cut example of Orange Is the New Black swerving wildly outside of its lane. Of course, police brutality and Black Lives Matter needed to exist within the world of the show. Since black people are more likely to be victims of the prison industrial complex, violence is a realistic expectation. Still, the show couldn’t help but do what it does best in the process: humanize problematic characters. The thing is, you can’t humanize a prison guard who killed an innocent black fan favorite! It felt as though the show was taking a permanent “All Lives Matter” stance, and that’s its biggest disservice to its characters of color.

And as the show moved away from Piper toward characters like Poussey, it was hard to see her story treated as if it were just as important as racial profiling and the death of a black woman. The ending to the sixth and penultimate season serves as a perfect example of this dichotomy. The season finale, “Be Free,” introduced ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] detention centers (new territory for Orange Is the New Black) at the same time that Piper is released from Litchfield. But as Piper goes to meet her brother, Cal, Blanca, a Latina character we’ve known since the pilot, is separated and put on an ICE bus. In the final scene, Piper’s brother asks her what she’ll do next. And then the credits roll.

I’m sorry, but in what world do I care what Piper will do next? Blanca is being sent to an ICE detention center! Her boyfriend is waiting with flowers she’ll never get to see! Blanca sobs while Piper gets ready to eat some kind of chard-laced casserole, and the tonal shift is jarring.

Back in season two, when the show started bringing its more diverse characters into focus, it did a great job of handling those characters’ stories, because the stories were more personal. Gloria’s season two episode “Low Self-Esteem City” is a great example. It revealed that she’s a victim of domestic violence, giving more context for the prison gang plot the series also threw her into. Because, like Gloria, all of these women, despite their various backgrounds, had ended up in the same place, and it was captivating to explore why that was.

But with Poussey’s death in season four, the showrunners decided to turn Litchfield into a reflection of modern politics and characters became stand-ins for trending Twitter hashtags. When we consider how the show handled topics like Black Lives Matter or police corruption, it’s hard to have faith that Orange will know what to do with something as emotionally complex as detention camps. Will we see Blanca sleeping under a thermal blanket on a cement floor while Piper wonders whether she should go on a book tour?

However, it’s almost to the show’s credit that this is even a point of consideration. Orange Is the New Black was so good at creating a world outside of Piper that it was frustrating when it tried to turn its attention back to the boring, empty carcass of a Trojan horse that Piper’s character became.

The show was never afraid to take chances with big narrative shifts like kicking Piper’s ex-fiancée Larry Bloom to the curb, but the majority-white writing staff didn’t seem to understand the dissonance in portraying Piper’s struggles alongside the struggles of any of its characters of color, who often faced punishments that Piper avoided due to her privilege. Piper worked with white supremacists. She made money off the labor of other women in the prison. The show could’ve made her face consequences for any of these actions, but she never does. Things tend to work out for Piper and Alex. Meanwhile, Gloria almost sacrifices her freedom helping an ICE detainee call her children.

It sometimes felt as if the writers were brave enough to address certain realities of the show but still clung to Piper as a (very white) safety blanket to ground viewers if race or discrimination made them too uncomfortable. I don’t think you can have it both ways.

Emily: Well, [extremely white woman voice] as a boring, blonde white woman …

Okay, yes. The later Orange got in its run, the more the show seemed to be driven by whatever was in the headlines that year. This storytelling choice allowed for some truly electrifying moments, but it also created a strange situation where the show’s timeline began in 2013, then extended into some undefined year later in the 2010s, even though Piper’s incarceration technically only lasted 18 to 24 months. The timeline felt far too vague, and that feeling of being displaced in time only increased the sense that the series was cherry-picking major social and political issues to drag inside the walls of Litchfield in order to comment on them.

Having watched the final season, I’m of two minds about its contemporarily relevant ICE detention center plot. There are elements of it that the show handles very well (like the slow-building horror of the series’ Latina regulars who aren’t Blanca, as they realize what’s going on right under their noses), and there are other elements that are handled … less well. (I didn’t totally like the flashbacks to three of the detainees, which reduced them entirely to their trauma.) But I also appreciated the show’s willingness to depict the horrific nature of the detention center’s dehumanizing bureaucracy, the way that disappearing into it is like getting sucked into a horror novel where you don’t really exist, even if you’re standing right in front of the person who’s insisting you don’t.

I’ve always been a Piper Chapman fan, however, so this may be where we differ most. And I think the final season is instructive when it comes to how the show uses Piper. She doesn’t become an author like Piper Kerman (the real woman she is loosely based on) did. She doesn’t even try to become an activist (outside of taking some courses that suggest she’s going to work in some sort of legal field). She simply lives her life and eventually gets a job at Starbucks. But Orange is smart in how it shows that Piper’s indiscretions — like using drugs while she’s on parole — lead to far lesser consequences for her than they do for, say, the character of Maritza, who discovers she was brought to the US illegally as a child and disappears into the ICE detention system.

That Piper’s slap on the wrist occurs in the same episode as Maritza’s ultimate punishment is pointed, I think. Even if Orange’s audience is racially diverse, what data we have suggests that it’s watched by a lot of white people. In that sense, Orange can (intentionally, I would argue) operate as a kind of White Person’s First Guide to White Privilege. It’s hard to ignore that if Piper hadn’t been a nice white lady, she might have been sent right back to prison; it’s also hard to ignore that if Maritza had been white, she wouldn’t have been detained, even if she was still an undocumented immigrant.

The way Piper eventually just slipped back into a version of her old life was one of the most damning things the show could have said about structural inequality. But, also, the show might have been able to establish that commentary without spending quite as much time with the character as it did. How did you feel about this season’s balance of Piper and the characters of color, especially the ICE detainees and Cindy (who is also released from prison and eventually falls into homelessness)?

Ashley: The weird need on the part of the show to connect the struggles these women faced to larger political moments often seemed entirely arbitrary. That’s what’s so frustrating!

It’s like there are two shows within Orange Is the New Black. If you want beautiful, moving character drama, watch the white characters: Elderly kitchen head Red faces dementia, Piper and her ex-fiancée Larry find closure, and lovable reprobate Pennsatucky spirals into a tragic arc. If you want “topic of the week” political drama, the show uses its characters of colors’ arbitrary suffering to unfurl it, because headlines demand that they suffer in these ways. There are characters like Daya and Suzanne who have been able to bridge the gap between these two modes in past seasons. But the longer the show ran, and in the final season especially, the more it failed to straddle that line.

There are sure to be fans who absolutely love the finale. It gives viewers closure, reunites Piper and Alex forever, and brings back fan favorites for cameo send-offs. And while we do get happy endings for black and brown characters, the show’s dissonance between reality and tragedy is also clear. If you are a viewer who strongly connects with the ICE storyline and issues of immigration, the show will leave you with the image of Karla, left alone in the desert with a broken foot, struggling to cross the US-Mexico border and reach her kids again. Since finishing the show, the image of Karla in the desert is what has stuck with me. Seeing Blanca reconnect with her lover or Gloria with her kids doesn’t make Karla’s story easier to see.

The shot of Taystee trying to hang herself runs a close second for me. After receiving an unfair life sentence following the prison riot, Taystee falls into a deep depression. It was devastating to see this usually cheerful character lose her sense of self. Watching her become despondent and violent got the point across. Watching her tie a noose around her neck crossed a line. While both Karla and Taystee’s stories turned into tragedy porn, in Taystee’s case, it’s the method that rankles. Viewers already know Taystee is suicidal, and she could have, say, swallowed too many pills to indicate her intent. But no, we need to see her fail to hang herself and remind the audience of Sandra Bland.

Moments like these characterize Orange’s legacy for me. I’m not sure what it takes to be able to watch this show and separate everything else from those moments.

But I don’t regret watching OITNB. Several characters of color were given life and purpose. Daya and Sophia are the best examples of this. Sophia’s journey from victim to activist to freedom showed the character’s sacrifice and abuse and subsequent growth. Daya, on the other hand, regressed as she lost more and more freedom. Watching her fall from innocent artist to a drug-addicted gang leader felt realistic rather than overly tragic. She’s lost her child and the man she loved. Her hopelessness wasn’t caused by societal circumstances but her own actions.

Sophia and Daya’s respective scenes with Piper and Taystee during this final season hit right in that perfect middle ground that made the show so good in early seasons. Piper and Sophia are both free, but Sophia’s freedom came with a sacrifice, since she had to drop her lawsuit against MCC, the private owners of Litchfield. Daya and Taystee are both facing life in prison, but Taystee chooses to do good rather than follow Daya’s path. These stories all work in great parallel.

I can’t think of another show that could handle this many characters for seven seasons and remain faithful to their growth the entire time. I wish I could walk away from this show happy with the thoughts of Nicky taking Red’s place or Gloria seeing her kids again, but then I think of Karla. Pennsatucky died, and that death didn’t hit as hard as the show’s ending for Karla, alone in that desert. Pennsatucky got to be a full-fledged character — Karla was forced to be nothing but a stand-in for so many undocumented immigrants. And that affinity for brutal, exploitative tragedy ended up being the show’s greatest weakness and what kept me from loving it wholeheartedly.

Emily, what will this show’s legacy be for you?

Emily: It’s interesting how you describe the way the show frequently turned the characters of color into “stand-ins” for certain news stories or other sociopolitical moments. And honestly, I feel like this was something the show became worse at the longer it ran. In the early going, a character like Sophia was groundbreaking for being one of TV’s first prominent trans characters. But had we first met her in the final season, she might not have been the multifaceted hairdresser we came to love. Instead, her arc may have been about violence against trans women of color, because violence against trans women of color is in the news.

What managed to keep Sophia from that fate might just be that Laverne Cox’s career blew up, and she ended up having less time for the final few seasons of the show. (She makes just a brief cameo in season seven to assure us that she’s doing fine.) And many of the show’s characters of color saw their actors’ availability tossed into doubt by the show’s sudden popularity, which led to the actors getting work elsewhere, and so on and so forth.

That’s not really Orange’s fault, as it didn’t have an infinite budget to lock down its many regular characters in the early going (although when its budget increased between seasons one and two, it did lock down actors like Danielle Brooks and Uzo Aduba). But it’s also telling that so many of the characters who were in every season were white, specifically because in that first season, most of the series regulars, the people under contract to this show and this show alone, were white.

And this is not me saying that I would have wanted to watch a version of this show without Piper or Red or Alex or Pennsatucky. Far from it. I liked all those characters. But it is to say that even Orange Is the New Black seemed a little surprised by how much people loved its many vibrant women of color. That speaks to your point about how the show, even when it tried really hard, was perpetually filtered through a white lens.

Where I part with you a bit is in your argument that the show didn’t offer us the rich storytelling for characters of color that it did for white characters in its final season. I, too, disliked the moment when Taystee attempted suicide, but I think the rest of her final season arc was perhaps the strongest of the whole run.

Her coming to grips with the fact that a grave injustice had been done to her (and had resulted in her serving a life sentence), but also trying to find a way to make something of her circumstances, struck me as perhaps the show’s most hopeful ending, and Brooks was the final season’s strongest performer hands down. (Her grief after Pennsatucky’s death was searing.)

And while Gloria didn’t get quite as strong of an arc, her slow-building realization that she could only do so much for the ICE detainees gave Selenis Leyva some of her strongest work throughout the series. Contrast this with, say, the bizarre compression of Blanca’s storyline in the finale, where she went from receiving her green card to going back to Honduras to be with Diablo because love conquers all, I guess.

But I think it’s telling that the characters the series lavished the most attention on in its final season are Piper and Taystee. Neither will ever reach as much of their potential as they might have. But they’re both working to build something better with what they have. That those two versions of “something better” look so different isn’t an accident, and its subtle (maybe too subtle!) storytelling about broken systems within this country might be the show’s truest legacy.

Ashley, I want to turn that question back toward you. What do you think the show’s legacy will be? And what should it be?

Ashley: You raise a great point about Sophia. That storyline could have so easily felt exploitative, but Orange always kept her personhood in mind. That empathy and Laverne Cox’s talent meant that Sophia’s was a story I felt lucky to watch unfold.

And even with my many problems with the show, when I think of my favorite characters and moments, I feel a weird sense of gratitude. Orange Is the New Black gave us a glimpse into the lives of people who aren’t usually featured on TV shows. For some of those characters, it did an amazing job of bridging real-world issues with intimate drama. So despite its faults, maybe the show’s legacy should be how well it could write nuanced minority characters. Moments like Gloria admitting it was her cellphone being used to contact ICE detainees or Taystee receiving Pennsatucky’s diploma after the latter died made Orange Is the New Black one of the best character dramas of all time. And that character drama focused on women of color! So ... I should be grateful, right?

It’s just that the show is also a glaring example of what not to do with minority characters. There’s the legacy I want the show to have, and there’s the grim reality of what the show is. I can’t separate Taystee struggling to breathe or Poussey lying lifeless on the ground from the show’s better elements. I can’t stop thinking of Karla in the desert when I try to remember what I liked.

Tragedy is a powerful tool, and the show did use it well from time to time. But the longer the show ran, the more it seemed as if the writers were more interested in the buzz suffering could create. But Orange Is the New Black’s viewers of color don’t need these reminders, especially when they’re deployed recklessly.

We don’t need to be reminded of Eric Garner while we’re watching a beloved character die. We don’t need to imagine Sandra Bland’s final moments projected onto someone we’ve built a connection with over seven seasons. We don’t need to be shown the horrors of ICE detention. When the show uses tragedy in this fashion, it’s clear the writers are working from a white perspective and aiming at a white audience that doesn’t think these horrors can be subtle. At a certain point in its run, the show decided it had the job of educating its white viewers, and it came at the expense of alienating black and brown viewers. The show doesn’t seem to care that black and brown viewers may walk away horrified by what they’ve seen so long as white viewers better understand whatever social justice hashtag is currently trending.

I want to feel grateful for Orange because it featured people who look like me. But it ended up making viewers like me secondary to its supposed need to educate white viewers. A lot of viewers of color that I know stopped watching when Poussey died. You just can’t use a community’s deepest fears and traumas in a senseless effort to educate the majority.

It will take some time before I can say if my love for stories like Sophia’s or Cindy’s outweighs my disdain for the tragedy porn, but right now, it doesn’t. As the cast members said goodbye in short clips featured over the finale’s credits, I couldn’t find joy in it. I still love characters like Red and Suzanne, but I haven’t been able to recommend this season to viewers who dropped out long ago. I don’t want them stuck with the image of Karla dying in the desert, a moment so heavy it consumes everything else. And a moment that was totally unnecessary.

That divide between intentions and tragedy porn executions won’t be Orange’s legacy for everyone. But I’m afraid it will be for me.