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July 2, 2015 4:09 pm

I am so content right now in my life. So content, I am, with the new content on Netflix.  It comes with immense joy that the eagerly awaited third series of Orange Is The New Black is back and I’m literally the happiest I’ve ever been.
Having been a massive ITV Bad Girls fan back in the early Noughties, with the likes of ‘Chelle Dockley et al formulating my adolescence and my awareness of powerful women on screen, it was only natural for me to progress onto more international women prison based dramas.

Moving with the times, I went all viral and found myself technologically advancing into the depths of non linear based programme platforms. Netflix, although might sound like a shampoo for when you get lice, is actually nothing to do with tearing your hair out whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite and it doesn’t come with that annoying plastic comb, or with a letter to your Mum from your school advising you to have a good wash. Now I’m pretty sure my blog readers (all 5 of them) haven’t been living under a rock for the past year and so are aware of the Netflix phenomenon. But for the benefit of say, lets face it, my Mum, Netflix is an entirely internet based TV and Film website. On which, you can watch anything you please, when you please, with no time restrictions. It throws scheduled broadcasting and the EPG out the window. Giving the viewer more control, (and more of a life). Gone are the days when your best mate wouldn’t come down The Nags’ Head for the Pub Quiz on a Wednesday night because Wednesday is ‘Corrie’ night.

Orange Is The New Black was the first drama to feature solely on an Internet forum and is exclusive to Netflix.

The popularity of Orange Is The New Black and Netflix has been vast and rapid over the last two years. Similar to the sudden surge and fashion for watching Breaking Bad.

At first I was a bit dubious though, the word ‘Orange’ in the title had me thinking that it was the Yankee spin off to TOWIE, (TOWITT- The Only Way Is Trailer Trash). But when I realised that the only thing Orange in the show was the Fashion, popularized by the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, I abandoned my preconceptions.

After the void that Breaking Bad left in my social life, OITNB came at the perfect time. ‘Orange’ is every bit as compelling and enthralling but with a more significant and omniscient moral message than Breaking Bad. That moral message being that drugs are bad not good. What a revelation.

Although Breaking Bad did have a political message- that some good can come out of the US’s lack of a free medical service. Great art is always the product of hard times. That’s crystal (meth) clear.

The show also taught me that money laundering isn’t accidentally leaving a tenner in the pocket of your jeans and then putting them in the wash. So thanks BB for educating me.

But the great thing about ‘Orange Is The New Black’ that ‘Breaking Bad’ didn’t do is allow you to binge watch entire series. I’ve lost entire days, watching back to back episodes. Most people lose entire days by binge drinking, I do it by binge watching. And then once I am done, the show is in my soul. I start calling my boyfriend ‘bitch’, and strutting round the house with a ‘girl don’t mess with me’ type swagger. My friends tell me to ‘stop talking like I’m in prison’ and everything. It gets into my PSYCH, girl! Educating me on how to speak to people if I ever get mugged. FYI- getting up on someone’s Grille is not taking over someone’s barbecue.

I was at the gym the other day, and I was in the showers and I started to actually fantasise about being a character in ‘Orange Is The New Black’. It’s fun pretending you’re in prison.

What strikes me though is that not a lot of men watch the show. I keep telling my male friends, ‘doesn’t all the lesbian sex pull you in?’ Who knows maybe all my male friends are gay, which would be weird because I work in Theatre and The Arts.

But it’s not all lesbian prison sex. I really enjoyed the episode I watched last night for instance entitled ‘Finger In The Dyke’.

But in all seriousness it has encouraged me spiritually. Whenever I watch the opening credits and hear the theme song, one line always resonates with me and it’s ‘moving on is easy, standing still is hard’. Standing still is hard. Not progressing in life, not evolving, not learning, not developing, staying the same, not bettering yourself. That really is scary. And a bit sad.

‘But you’ve got time’. Interpret that how you will. Time can be good, in comedy for example it’s all in the timing. In life, we all want more time. More time doing what we love. More time with our friends and family. But in prison time is a bad thing. Wishing your life away.
Imagine that.

 

It does seem to me that ‘Orange Is The New Black’ is every bit as socio-analytical and psycho-analytical as ‘A Clock Work Orange’.