Jenji Kohan’s show Orange Is The New Black is based off of
Piper Kerman’s book of the same name. The show centers around Taylor
Schilling’s Piper Chapman, who is obviously based upon Kerman herself. After
three seasons, the first name to appear in the opening credits is Taylor
Schilling and the first name to appear in the closing credits is “Executive Consultant Piper Kerman”. The entire first season is centered around Piper
Chapman’s life, how she got into prison, the instances in her life that made
her who she is today, and balancing life in prison with her old, outside life.
While the show is truly an ensemble cast, Schilling’s Chapman is clearly the
lead. Yet for as much as people love Orange
Is The New Black, they can’t stop themselves from demanding a show without
Piper Chapman.
This seems like an odd request to
me, since the show itself very clearly told its audience who its star was. Yet
as the seasons of the show progressed and as Kohan and crew developed as
artists, they started fading Piper farther into the background, or rather, they
realized what a deep bench they had and started to bring more and more players
into the foreground. We got our fair share of interesting characters in the
show’s first season, and we grew to love those characters more and more as the
show progressed. Eventually, the show phased out characters like Larry (Jason Biggs)
and Polly (Maria Dizzia), characters who only existed to show Piper’s life
outside of the Litchfield prison and started focusing on the more interesting
characters and cliques and prison guards within the system. Season 4 will focus
on even more characters as the amount of prisoners doubled plus the addition of
Blair Brown’s Martha Stewart/Paula Dean amalgam Judy King, making even more
sense to write off Piper Chapman completely.
Initially, I was very opposed to
the idea of Orange writing off Piper.
Television has had a long and storied history of removing its lead and becoming
a poorer show as a result. Most recently, The
Office, which was already going downhill to begin with, went into the
crapper after Steve Carell left. Two and
a Half Men, which not the greatest show to begin with, was still
significantly diminished once Charlie Sheen was replaced by Ashton Kutcher.
Despite reports to the contrary, Piper Chapman was still the lead of her show,
and you can’t remove your lead character.
Then something eye-opening
occurred (at least for me). Zooey Deschanel took a sabbatical from her show New Girl as a result of her pregnancy
and the show briefly replaced her with Megan Fox. I thought this would work to
disastrous results, but the show ended up having its best six week stretch in a
long time. While the show was based upon Deschanel’s character and was picked
up by FOX thanks to her involvement with the show, Deschanel’s character
Jessica Day was actually a supporting character. As New Girl went along, initial supporting characters like Nick Miller
(Jake Johnson) and Schmidt (Max Greenfield) became the true co-leads of the
show which relegated Jess to co-star status. So when Deschanel briefly left the
show, it allowed the true co-leads Nick and Schmidt to really shine without
having Jessica and whatever her potential storyline of the week would have been
to drag the show down.
While it seems relatively simple
to have a show without Piper- the character received a decently small sentence
of only 18 months and it wouldn’t be unrealistic of the show to release her
early or get her sent to Maximum Security, a place where no character has come
back from- Orange Is The New Black is
not going to completely write her off of the show. The complaints about Piper
as a character have been there since Season 1. As a slight F.U. to the fans,
the very first episode of Season 2 is solely about Piper and we don’t even see
anyone else until Episode 2. The fact remains, this is a show about Piper
Chapman. No matter how loud the fans get, Piper just isn’t going anywhere.
Personally, I don’t really want
Piper to go anywhere. I agree that she is less interesting than a lot of other
characters, but she is certainly interesting in her own right. Orange delves deep into class relations,
and Piper’s crusty upper-middle-class status is a part of that chain. Her
status works as a nice dichotomy compared to the rest of the inmates. The fact
that Piper was granted a day leave to visit her sick Grandmother while the rest
of the inmates, mostly of Hispanic and African-American decent, weren’t granted
the same opportunity for problems seemingly more severe than Piper’s is a
pretty good representation of the complaints of our society as a whole. Part of
the reason we hate Piper is because we hate White Entitlement, which is exactly
the point. Further, Piper’s presence helps bolster your affinity for other
characters like Taystee and Crazy Eyes. You can enjoy characters more when you
can easily compare to a character you strongly dislike- like Piper.
I completely understand where the
fans are coming from who do not like Piper. She is a purposefully unlikable
character and that’s a steep hurdle for many fans to overcome. Her actions like
sending Ruby Rose’s Stella to Max is a completely horrifying and unredeemable
action. But the reason you hate Piper so much for that is because the show has
forced you to connect emotionally with the character. Whether you like Piper or
you hate her, you still have feelings for her. One of the worst sins a show can
commit is by not forcing to create an emotional bond with its characters.
Preacher is currently having that problem. If you’re demanding Piper off of the
show, then Jenji Kohan has done her job.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ON PIPER CHAPMAN? DO YOU WANT ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK TO WRITE HER OFF OF THE SHOW? LET US KNOW ON OUR FACEBOOK PAGE!
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