- #Orange is the new black season 1 characters series#
- #Orange is the new black season 1 characters tv#
#Orange is the new black season 1 characters tv#
The show spun out her 15-month sentence for as long as it could, given the creep of jail time and the inevitability of aging, even for TV actors. Realistically, Piper was always going to get out of prison.
“How do you deal with it?” Piper replied, chastened. So, like, if you want to trade places, I’m game.” They see dangerous, poor, ghetto black girl that should be locked up in here forever. People out there been fucking with me my entire fucking life. That’s why they never gonna stop fucking with you, because of what you represent.
“It’s ’cause of what they see when they look at you. “Can I be real with you?” Taystee responded. “What is it about me that makes people want to fuck with me?” a disconsolate Piper asked, having had pink gum lodged in her hair and drugs planted in her shoe. In Season 6, she and Piper had a scene that skewered Piper’s privilege in a single exchange. Resourceful, sharp, outlandish, funny, and perpetually kind, Taystee continued to thwart all the ways in which the system tried to beat her down. But she was also, thanks to Brooks’s performance, one of the most spectacular characters on television.
#Orange is the new black season 1 characters series#
Through her story, the series considered the failures of the parole system, recidivism, and-in later seasons-the way racist institutions configure and protect themselves. Piper was lured into smuggling cash for a drug dealer because the thrill of it excited her Taystee wanted no part in the drug trade, but ended up doing the books for a dealer who offered her an alternative to yet another group home.īy Season 2, when Orange got to more aggressively deconstructing its Trojan-horse setup, Taystee was already being positioned as the show’s most crucial component. Piper traveled after college and made artisanal soaps Taystee worked in fast-food restaurants. Whereas Piper grew up in affluence and studied comparative literature at Smith, Taystee was raised in group homes and foster care, and first went to juvenile prison at the age of 16. In the script, she was a foil for Piper that the writers could use to explore the school-to-prison pipeline in America. And as Orange Is the New Black continued over seven seasons, the woman who became the true core of the series was Taystee. The scene seems to encapsulate something, now: Piper was always ostensibly the central character of Jenji Kohan’s prison-set dramedy, but Piper’s genial vacuousness as a heroine was set up from the beginning as a backdrop against which other characters could sing. The two women banter for a moment about Piper’s paper-towel shower sandals and her “TV titties.” As Piper walks away, the camera lets her go and instead closes in on Taystee, who’s singing loudly and joyfully in the stall. As she shivers under trickles of lukewarm water, her reverie is interrupted by a loudspeaker announcement about mandatory lice checks, and by Tasha “Taystee” Jefferson (Danielle Brooks), who arrives in her nightgown and demands that Piper hurry up. In the very first scene of the very first episode of Orange Is the New Black, released on Netflix in 2013, Piper (played by Taylor Schilling) takes her first shower as an inmate at Litchfield prison. This article contains spoilers through the entire series of Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black.