The Women of Jenji Kohan: Weeds, Orange is the New Black, and GLOW: A Collection of Essays

By Scarlett Harris

The Women of Jenji Kohan, creator of such landmark shows as Weeds, Orange Is the New Black, and GLOW, is the latest in Fayetteville Mafia Press's pioneering series examining the female characters of legendary creators of television and film. Here, writers from all walks of life analyze the significance of such iconic characters as Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker), Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) and the host of women residing in Litchfield Correctional Institution, Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie), and Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), to both themselves and to pop culture at large. Edited by Scarlett Harris (A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment), The Women of Jenji Kohan: Weeds, Orange Is the New Black, and GLOW is the third book in the unique "The Women Of" series, following The Women of David Lynch (June 2019) and The Women of Amy Sherman-Palladino (November 2019).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fayetteville Mafia Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781949024319

Book preview

Edited by

Scarlett Harris

The Women of ... Series

The Women of David Lynch

(2019)

The Women of Amy Sherman-Palladino: Gilmords, and Mrs. Maisel

(2020)

The Series of Jenji Kohan

covered in this book

Weeds (2005)

Orange Is the New Black (2013)

GLOW (2017)

Teenage Bounty Hunters (2020)

The scripts of Jenji Kohan

covered in this book

Gilmore Girls (2000)e Girls, Bunhea

The Women of Jenji Kohan © 2022 Scarlett Harris

All Rights Reserved.

Reproduction in whole or in part without the author’s permission is strictly forbidden. All photos and/or copyrighted material appearing in this book remain the work of its owners.

Cover art by Thania Guerra

Cover text by Blake Morrow

Edited by David Bushman

Book design by Scott Ryan

Published in the USA by Fayetteville Mafia Press

Columbus, Ohio

Contact Information

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ISBN: 9781949024302

eBook ISBN: 9781949024319

All pictures are for editorial use only. The Women of Jenji Kohan is a scholarly work of review and commentary only and no attempt is made, or should be inferred, to infringe upon the copyrights or trademarks of any corporation.

For all our daughters.

1

The Women of Jenji Kohan

By Scarlett Harris

Content warning: This chapter contains mentions of racism and racist violence.

The final scene of what would become GLOW’s final season has been on my mind since it aired in 2019.

The ragtag group of gorgeous ladies of wrestling whom the show follows had just finished up their Las Vegas residency for the holiday break and were heading home to spend Christmas with their respective families. Protagonist Ruth (Alison Brie) is at a crossroads, being rebuffed for yet another acting gig. Meanwhile, Debbie (Betty Gilpin) is sick of being underestimated by the men around her who see her as just a trophy, and decides to steal a TV out from under her mover-and-shaker boyfriend. She runs through the Vegas airport, chasing Ruth to share the news. I’m going to build us an Eden, where we run the show. You and me . . . we’ll call the shots, Debbie tells Ruth, offering Ruth the job of director. Ruth rejects Debbie’s proposal, insisting that she’s not done with her dream of being an actress yet.

If being an actor was going to happen for you, it would have happened by now. How many times are you going to break your own heart? Debbie says to a visibly dejected Ruth. "You don’t want to be happy, successful, powerful?"

Ruth tells Debbie that’s Debbie’s dream, and Ruth gets on her flight home. The final frame of GLOW features Debbie in her tan trenchcoat and one of her signature oversized, embellished sweaters, gazing back at her former best friend.

This scene imprinted itself on my brain because it flipped the rom-com trope of the grand gesture on its head, solidifying GLOW as a show about the platonic love among women, specifically Ruth and Debbie, who had been trying to find their way back to each other after Debbie’s husband cheated on her with Ruth in the pilot. Though Ruth had been the one trying to make amends with Debbie throughout the majority of the show in the annoying way that only she can manage, as Elizabeth Teets writes in her ode to the character, it was Debbie who made perhaps the biggest and boldest move to mend their friendship, and was left wanting.

It also foreshadowed what I was sure would be Ruth changing her mind and the two of them running their own wrestling company—the show itself is based on the 1980s women’s wrestling program of the same name—decades before their real-life counterparts had any modicum of power and control in the industry. Padya Paramita and Heather Bandenburg touch on the women’s wrestling evolution of the mid-2010s to now in their essays in this book on what GLOW meant to them, while Harmony Cox focuses on how the show dropped the ball on queer representation.

But in late 2020 it was announced that Netflix wouldn’t be moving forward with the already-greenlit fourth and final season of GLOW due to concerns about staging a wrestling show in which its performers had to be in close contact during a viral pandemic, even though large actual wrestling companies had been in operation throughout. (Not that I think they should have been—or any entertainment, for that matter.) To boot, Netflix canceled its other Jenji Kohan effort, the charming Teenage Bounty Hunters—which Zosha Millman writes a love letter to about its progressive portrayal of teen sex—after one season. Lauren Pinnington offers a kind of companion piece to this, writing about the Kohan-penned episode of Gilmore Girls, Kiss and Tell.

This marked the first time in seven years that executive producer Kohan did not have a show in production with the streamer,¹ since the premiere of 2013’s Orange Is the New Black, a show that arguably changed television history.

Orange Is the New Black, based on Piper Kerman’s prison memoir of the same name, followed middle-class White woman Piper Chapman’s (Taylor Schilling) entrée to incarceration.

If you’ve read or heard anything about Orange Is the New Black, it’s probably been about Piper’s status as a Trojan horse that allowed Kohan to explore the lives of women who have been historically underrepresented in Hollywood and overrepresented in the prison population: poor, queer women of color. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of Black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this White girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories, Kohan told NPR in 2013.² Dani Bethea and Rebecca Bodenheimer dive deep into how these identities were explored on the show in their essays.

Even though Orange Is the New Black was extremely my shit—long-form storytelling about women’s lives—it somehow slipped under my radar when it premiered in July 2013 (maybe because Netflix wasn’t made available in Australia, where I live, until 2015). It took my best friend prompting me to watch it maybe a couple of months later, and I was immediately hooked. So, it seemed, was the rest of the world.

At least one minute of Orange Is the New Black, one of the first Netflix originals, was seen by 105 million Netflix subscribers, as reported in 2019,³ making it the platform’s most watched show at the time. The spate of shows about queer people of color that have cropped up in its wake proved that we no longer need Trojan horses to make diverse stories palatable.

You better believe I was first in line to watch the second season, which I rewatched immediately after the credits rolled on the thirteenth episode. As is the case with so many shows, the first season was plot heavy, setting the scene of Litchfield Correctional Institution, but Season 2 allowed audiences to sit among the characters and really get to know them. I was blown away by Lorna Morello’s (Yael Stone), Gloria Mendoza’s (Selenis Leyva), and Black Cindy Hayes’s (Adrienne C. Moore) flashbacks (a storytelling device that Orange Is the New Black deployed in every episode to help audiences understand how the women got there), while Lorraine Toussaint was a standout as villain Vee. Despite the dark cloud Vee wrought on an already depressing existence that was life in Litchfield, Season 2 was the standout of the series and is one I think about often, like GLOW’s final season. Author and formerly incarcerated woman Morgan Godvin writes about her own experiences and how the show so accurately portrayed them as to make her inexplicably nostalgic for that time in her life.

Orange Is the New Black day, as I affectionately began calling the midyear Friday on which the season would drop, became appointment viewing for me over the ensuing five years. I cleared my schedule to catch up with my favorite fictional incarcerated women and, as the series progressed, some of my favorite fictional formerly incarcerated women.

Unfortunately, Orange Is the New Black was also met with a lot of outrage from fans after the fourth season. As Bethea writes, The worthlessness and disposability of Black lives is the roadblock that makes Black people hesitant to invest in stories about Black characters, especially when written by predominantly White writing teams, as the Orange Is the New Black writers’ room was revealed to be.

Although I found seasons one and six to be the weakest from a storytelling perspective, the death of beloved character Poussey (Samira Wiley) at the end of Season 4 was unconscionably and uncomfortably similar to that of the myriad Black people killed by law enforcement, setting off a several-season slump that Orange Is the New Black arguably never recovered from, especially to its Black fans. Season 4 excelled in other ways, though, such as the nuanced portrayal of interethnic tensions within the growing Latinx prison population, as Bodenheimer writes.

The blind spots of telling stories that are not our own is a problem that has plagued other Jenji Kohan-helmed productions. The actresses of color wrote an open letter to the producers of GLOW ahead of production on the fourth season (which filmed several episodes before the forced stoppage caused by COVID-19) urging better racial representation on the show, while Weeds continued to diminish its Black and Brown cast members from Season 4 of its eight-season run as Shane Thomas contends in Chapter 4.

Weeds, Kohan’s first series as showrunner, premiered in 2005. I watched the DVD (remember those?) box set of the first season, which follows widow Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) as she makes a new life for herself as a weed dealer, during a haze of stomach flu. Along with developing an aversion to some foods during my illness, I must have developed one to Weeds, as I didn’t watch the subsequent seven seasons until I had to for this book.

Thomas further extrapolates on Nancy’s status as a rudimentary antiheroine at the dawn of the golden age of television, keeping company with the antiheroes of prestige TV. Sydney Urbanek affords Nancy’s incorrectness a grace the show doesn’t necessarily deserve, but is a valuable retrospective. Sabra Boyd has loosely interpreted the concept of this book, looking at the woman who wrote the fabled Weeds theme song. Watching Weeds through the lens of 2020s wokeness