Orange Is The New Black: 6 Reasons It's Netflix's Best Original Series
2. It Makes You Feel Something
Truly great art - be it TV, film, music, a painting, a sculpture, a book, whatever - makes you feel something. Whether it's overwhelming joy, intense sadness, or a burning rage, they're doing their job when the audience really connects on a level beyond just looking.
When it comes to Netflix, for example, no series fills me with more happiness than Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, whose unbridled optimism and sugary sweetness is highly infectious.
OITNB, too, is capable of moments of real happiness, even if you know - because these women are in prison - that they're likely to be fleeting, like Rosa hitting Vee with a bus, or all of the inmates finding brief escape in the lake. At the same time, however, because it walks that line between comedy and drama, it can also be devastating, and one of the most emotional shows on TV; be it the tortures inflicted by Vee, Pennsatucky being raped, or Poussey being killed, the show can be painful to watch, and it has the ability to make you tearful or furious at these injustices, if not both.
Even beyond the actions of what we're seeing within the narrative and the show's world, the way it depicts real-life means that you're also questioning how these things are allowed to happen, and think about prison in a different way than you did before.