Bingewatching Orange is the New Black

In the last two weeks, I watched all three seasons of Orange is the New Black on Netflix. A friend is loaning me her subscription, so this was my first taste of bingewatching and the addictive power of streaming.

I loved watching the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt series last year, and I can’t wait for season two. Now after watching OITNB, I’ve really started to appreciate Netflix original series.

There are so many reasons I found it compelling: the characters that aren’t represented in other shows (mostly marginalized groups), the structure of prison society, and all the storylines that involve cults and Christian evangelical subculture.

Now I have to wait until this summer when season 4 releases.

I like to transcribe dialogue when I watch shows. It’s one of the ways that I process. I guess it’s just a journalism thing.

Here’s my favorite Orange is the New Black quotes, organized by season.

— Season 1 —

“Lesbians are dangerous. It’s all that testosterone.”

“I’m not your wife.”
“I threw my pie for you.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never cleaned up another person’s pee before.”
“Quite a privileged life you’ve led.”

“Are you saying your Mercy is like the good Lord Jesus? Did your Mercy die for our sins?”

“The whole meal has to come to $1.05 a prisoner. Taxpayers don’t care if it’s a holiday. We’re the bad guys.”

“And you’re not invited, because they don’t allow gay people on their rapture bus.”
“There’s a bus? Are all the seats already taken by Appalachian methheads?”

“They take a bunch of insecure and frustrated men and put them in charge of a bunch of frustrated women and they become these predatory creeps.”

“You can rage, but they always win. They’re the ones with the keys.”

“They keep the lights on so you lose all sense of time. It’s not living, I mean yeah, you’re breathing, but you ain’t a person no more. It’s bad.”

“You start to see shit that ain’t there. You start to hear voices. They keep you here until they break you.”

“My glasses were broken in the name of Jesus. She’s decided it’s her Christian duty to annihilate me because I’m a privileged rich girl.”

“Hey, not lesbians, it’s 11.”

“You even so much as squawk about God in here and you get thrown in with the Looney Tunes.”
“Yeah, well, liberals are everywhere.”

“Wow. Twitter’s got nothing on prison.”

— Season 2 —

“Look at you, wasting your freedom.”

“Love is light. Acceptance.”

“I lost my manipulative, gorgeous, psychopath ex and my sweet, kind, unfocused fiance. I don’t have a home anymore.”

“Every day in here, I get more confused.”

“You ever been kissed by a six foot black transgender woman?”

“Hey, Red, I really need some matches.”
“Matches? Good, I was just thinking our chances of dying in some nut job arsonist fire bomb weren’t high enough already.”

“Am I in a f***ing M. Night Shalamalama movie or is that inmate wearing green eyeshadow?”

“You want to assassinate someone? Vision is a basic requirement.”

“Couldn’t you try to kill me some place drier?”
— Season 3 —

“I didn’t come here to smuggle or to beat people, I came here to garden.”

“Jesus’ girlfriend got a real good point.”

“Perk is for coffee. It’s deplorable in people.”

“You’re not religious? Oh, that’s unfortunate. Because if you were a Christian, you could tell everyone what to do and they wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings because that’s against the law.”

“Everybody acts cool most of the time, you know? ‘Oh, Sophia, hit me with the gossip,’ ‘What do you think about bangs, Sophia?’ You start to feel like one of the girls. But then something turns and you realize you’re still a freak and you’ll never be one of them.”
“Jesus said, ‘But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
“Nothin’ about disemboweling your enemies with a hot curling iron?”
“You’d think, right? Especially since he had it pretty rough there at the end. But he went quietly.”

“Maybe it’s about time you stopped worrying about everybody else and did something for you. That’s what everybody else in America does.”

“You can’t spend your whole life holding the door open for people and then being angry when they don’t thank you.”