Pasadena, CA -- If you’d like Piper to get a little nicer in Season 4 of Orange Is the New Black, maybe she will.
Or maybe she won’t.
Or maybe she doesn’t need to.
The cast and creators of Orange talked to TV writers here Sunday about the Netflix phenomenon, whose new season will be released June 17, and they resolutely spilled almost nothing about what to expect.
Concerning lead character Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), executive producer Jenji Kohan acknowledged there was discussion over whether Piper became a little darker and less likeable in Season 3.
“Piper is on a journey,” she said. “We work with the vicissitudes of ‘likeable’,” Kohan said.
Laverne Cox, who plays Sophia Burset, said she doesn’t think Piper needs any likeability tune-up.
“I think she’s very likeable,” said Cox.
Kohan did suggest Piper will have about the same prominence in this upcoming season, continuing the show’s move toward exploring more stories of other characters in the prison where they’re all incarcerated.
“This was always intended as an ensemble show,” said Kohan. “Piper in a lot of ways was our entrée into this world. That said, I think she’s always a presence, and we are all invested in her story. But as the world grows, we are invested in everyone’s story. I am, and I want to find out about all of the people we see.”
One character, however, is fading into history: Piper’s old boyfriend Larry Bloom (Jason Biggs), who was not seen at all in Season 3.
“We miss Jason,” she said. “But it feels organic. If we’re staying true to a prison story, those outside connections start to fray. They become more tenuous as she starts to forget about the bigger world and focus on the micro.”
In the broader picture, said Kohan, Season 4 will explore some areas on which Orange has also touched in the past, including “the corporatization of prisons and the stratification of the people into their little mosaic pieces in the prison.
“I’d like to talk more about it. I’m editing the finale now and it’s consuming my life. But I can’t.”
Blair Brown (left), who joined the show in Season 3 as Judy King, said what drew her was that the women characters are so refreshingly multi-dimensional.
She contrasted it to her role on the CBS show Limitless and the late Fox show Fringe, where she played corporate mastermind Nina Sharp.
“I loved my time on Fringe,” Brown said. “But that was originally a story about a female protagonist and a woman who was spooky and ran a giant corporation, and it turned into a story about a father and son. ‘Am I a good man?’ And that was kind of way off.
“Very often in this business, that’s what tends to happen. Limitless is a lovely place to work, but all I do is kind of nod and get people food and say to my son, ‘I love you,’ and, to my husband, ‘Don’t fight with Brian.’
“That’s what you do. It’s not that there’s anything against women. They just don’t know how to write women.”