Orange is the new breaking bad.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: Briefly Noted - Orange Is the New Black - Television program review - Brief article

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While other prison and police dramas, such as Breaking Bad and Oz, highlight (and glamorize) the nightmarish horrors of the drug war and the American criminal justice system, the new Netflix series Orange Is the New Black offers a contrast. This sad, occasionally funny chronicle of the system's careless arbitrariness is based on the memoir of a blonde twenty something Smith grad who carried a suitcase full of drug money for an ex-girlfriend and wound up incarcerated for it many years later.

While sentencing disparities, racial inequality, solitary confinement, and the...