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While others huddle in groups dissecting the latest episode of Game of Thrones, I’m trying to break the internet to get to Orange Is the New Black. Both of the latest seasons of these binge-watch shows are out.
Game of Thrones is about … actually I have no idea – I quit watching it in season two (one maybe, I’m not too certain). “Nothing happens,” I confessed to a Game of Thrones fan. He gasped from the shock before contemptuously hissing at me.
Orange Is the New Black, on the other hand, propels the storyline forward in every season and episode. It’s set in a women’s prison and is based on the memoir of a Waspy, middle-class blonde who finds herself behind bars when she is convicted of a crime she committed years before.
It’s been cited as an example in representation because of its multiracial and majority female cast. Some characters are butch, others feminine, and all races are represented.
There are lesbians, a transgender woman and straight women. There are quite a few older women, too, such as a wrinkly nun and a wise yoga instructor. They are all given equal TV time and dedicated storylines.
The show’s creator, Jenji Kohan, says the title character, Piper Chapman, was the Trojan horse to carry these women to mainstream TV.
“You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, Latina women, old women and criminals,” she said.
That’s a big political plus. But also meaningful is how the show comes to sit at the centre of current discourse about power. It’s an obvious theme for a show about people living under lock and key, but the show does not just deal with blatant restrictions. It is constantly unpacking the everyday subtleties of control, reflecting how regular women constantly negotiate power outside of prison walls.
Similar nuances are present in current events such as Louisa Wynand’s case against Western Cape ANC leader Marius Fransman and in the Brock Turner rape case in the US. Whether they’re simply wearing lipstick or, as the show’s meth-head character Pennsatucky puts it, “lesbianing together”, many women are always under surveillance.
Another of the show’s great triumphs is that characters are not banished into one of the only two personas that many female characters are forced to inhabit or have to move fixedly between, as cold bitches or understanding angels.
In the series House of Cards, the female protagonist, Claire Underwood as a modern-day Lady Macbeth, is exhausting. All darkness, she wears her heels everywhere like Satan’s horns, from battles in the White House to making sandwiches in her kitchen.
I might be getting carried away about the social significance of TV shows. Though I’m ready to argue why Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow living in snow for an entire season was a most leading and lazy metaphor for isolation, it presents a challenge to laud a TV show with society-changing credentials.
A few years ago, when I sat down in a lecture hall after an hour in a waiting line to listen to The Wire’s creator David Simon discuss the timeless masterpiece of the early 2000s, I expected to hear about how it had changed Baltimore, one of the roughest cities in the US.
Instead, what stayed with me was his sense of frustration that his work about systemic corruption, poverty and racism had succeeded more as cult entertainment than a vehicle for social and political change.
Locally, Yizo Yizo might not have had an effect on the education system or rape culture, but didn’t you feel a seismic shift in our psychosocial awareness with each episode, even if it was just defiance against parents?
I don’t want to believe that was mere fantasy.
Follow me on Twitter @joonji
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