Parents' Guide to Orange Is the New Black

A beautiful moment occurs in the first few minutes that signals to the viewer that this fact-based drama is more realistic than most. In Orange Is the New Black, the night before she's to go to prison, Chapman gropes her fiancé, whispering to him that she needs to make memories to "spank" to. He responds lustily, whereupon she tells him to hang on, she needs to pee. The camera follows her into the bathroom, where she sits on the toilet and cries. What a rare thing to see on-screen: a human being in a non-glamorous, utterly relatable bad moment. Made by the same mind who brought Weeds to life, Orange is like Weeds in that it has a lovely, vulnerable woman at its center, caught in a web of other women (and a few men) who are alternately menacing and loving. Also like Weeds, Orange has an incredible cast, filled with people you love and hadn't realized you'd missed. There's also a bevy of lesser-known actors with whom viewers will quickly fall in love, such as the touchingly vulnerable Samira Wiley as the lovelorn Poussey and wisecracking Danielle Brooks (The Color Purple, Peacemaker) as her best friend, Taystee.

As viewers watch, they slowly realize that Piper's story is just an entry point into the stories of Litchfield's inmates, a sort of Trojan horse that draws in viewers before the series reveals its true aim: to explore the lives of characters the likes of whom we don't often see on television. Old women, fat women, women of color, lesbians, poor women, those who've made mistakes and regret them, those who've made mistakes because the deck was stacked against them. This is top-level drama—addictive, layered, very funny, and made for binge-watching.