'Orange is the New Black' Charms Critics

The latest original series on Netflix, “Orange is the New Black,” premiered last week, its initial 13-episode season inspiring glowing reviews from most critics, who urged viewers to spend the weekend binge-watching the entire season. It’s a victory for Netflix, whose last two original series received much less critical love.

The show chronicles the prison adventures of Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), who is serving a 15-month sentence for carrying money for a drug-dealing former lover (Laura Prepon). The crime went down 10 years ago, and in the meantime, Piper has acquired a new male fiancé (Jason Biggs) and a budding career as an artisanal soap maker, a happy and normal life that is temporarily derailed by her incarceration. In prison, she finds herself in the midst of a colorful group of characters, each of whose backstories is gradually explored over the course of the series.

The show is based on the memoir of the same name by Piper Kerman, and it was created by Jenji Kohan, the creator of the suburban-mom-as-drug-dealer series “Weeds.” “Orange,” like “Weeds,” is played primarily for laughs—the comedy often veers toward the absurd—but it also takes the occasional shot at drama without resorting to the violence and melodrama typical of most prison stories.

One of Netflix’s original programming innovations has been to use the data it gathers about its members’ viewing habits to help decide which shows to produce. You can see the evidence of this focus-group approach in the genres of the shows already produced, which have fallen solidly into hot categories: a gangster drama (“Lilyhammer”), a political drama (“House of Cards”), a vampire thriller (“Hemlock Grove”) and a cult sitcom (“Arrested Development”). “Orange” is a bit more difficult to pigeonhole, but it still feels familiar; like “Weeds” and “Breaking Bad,” it’s another story about middle-class white people who get mixed up with a criminal element, a fish-out-of-water premise that lends itself well to both comedy and drama—and it’s proven to be popular with broad audiences.

Netflix has also shown itself to be generous with these new shows in terms of their future prospects. Without traditional ratings tracking, it’s difficult to know the truth of how viewers have responded to them; critics’ responses to the series have been the only audible voices, and their responses have been somewhat muddled. “Lilyhammer” came and went with little fanfare, but “House of Cards” raked in profuse critical praise. “Hemlock Grove,” on the other hand, was eviscerated by critics, and “Arrested Development,” the most hyped of all the original programs, drew mixed reviews. “Orange” looks to be a rebound from the reactions received by the last two series; the initial response to the show has been mostly very positive.

Netflix, for its part, has declared all of the series to be big successes, and the company has put its financial support behind each of them. The company has ordered second seasons of all the original series, even “Lilyhammer” and “Hemlock Grove” (but excluding, so far, “Arrested Development”), and the order for a new season of “Orange” went in before the first season even debuted.

This is a new model of support for TV series; Netflix is showing that not only will it support a series if  the show doesn’t make a huge initial splash—something a traditional network is unlikely to do—the pre-release order for season two of “Orange” proves that the company is committed to its new programs under any circumstances. With some of the series, the show of confidence seems questionable—will “Hemlock Grove” be able to make good use of its second chance?—but betting on the future of “Orange is the New Black” looks like a good gamble.