How much longer can Orange Is the New Black really run for? Not from a production or industry standpoint—if showrunner Jenji Kohan’s last series Weeds is any indication, Orange can run essentially forever, and Netflix, with its seemingly bottomless coffers, has already renewed it through seven full seasons. But how long can it keep its premise going before the show collapses on itself?
Taylor Schilling’s Piper Kerman, the ostensible protagonist of the show, is going to get out of prison eventually. Though the series could, in theory, keep introducing new characters and phasing out old ones, Kohan seems too attached to the show’s core cast to take this tack, keeping the focus tightly on the characters we’ve already spent four seasons with, up to and including the show’s continued insistence that we should care about Piper’s relationship with Alex (Laura Prepon). Thankfully for OITNB fans, even if the series goes off the rails, there are quite a few other shows currently on the air that approximate the show’s best qualities, from Transparent’s surrealism to latter-day Girls’ cutting zingers. But the best one is a children’s show airing on Cartoon Network: Steven Universe.
Created by former Adventure Time writer Rebecca Sugar, Steven Universe is a sci-fi action dramedy, with occasional musical numbers. The title character, Steven Quartz Universe, is a 14-year-old boy, the product of a union between Rose Quartz, an intergalactic Gem warrior who comes from a race of alien women, and Greg Universe, a guy who works at a car wash, makes prog rock, and lives in his van. Steven lives in a temple with some of the other remaining Gems: Garnet (voiced by the singer Estelle), Amethyst, and Pearl. He hangs out in his hometown of Beach City and occasionally fights monsters.
At first, these series sound totally unrelated. Steven is animated, OITNB is live-action. OITNB is a critical darling, while Steven Universe has slowly accumulated a devoted cult following. OITNB takes great care to remind you how adult it is, while Steven treats its mature emotional issues in terms accessible to children. But the similarities are striking.
For starters, both shows are about isolated groups of women. Where OITNB makes this literal by focusing on a women’s prison, the Crystal Gems of Steven Universe are refugees, the last remnants of a rebellion against the Gem Home World’s parasitic, authoritarian maternal society. In both cases, the characters’ perpetually solitary existence takes its toll—something Steven Universe can’t quite show with the same level of explicit, grotesque detail but that it can hint at, often with more emotional effectiveness. The Gems, in the world of the show, have been stranded on Earth, away from their home, for thousands of years, an issue that comes to the fore in one of two appearances by Orange Is the New Black actors on the show in the past few weeks.
Uzo Aduba, Suzanne on OITNB, voices Bismuth, an original member of the Crystal Gems who Steven discovers trapped inside his magical Lion. (It makes sense, I promise.) At first, Bismuth appears to be an exciting addition to the team—she’s a blacksmith who makes cool weapons and even cooler jokes—but she’s incapable of adapting to the softer, kinder way Steven wants to operate outside of wartime, and her appearance transforms into a meditation on generational change, self-determination and the legitimacy of battlefield tactics. Aduba is joined by Natasha Lyonne, appearing in Thursday’s episode as well as one on Monday as a fusion of Steven and Amethyst.
Fusion, a process by which the Gems “phase into each other” and become one stronger Gem, serves on Steven Universe as a metaphor for all sorts of relationships—creative partnerships, friendships, romantic connections. One episode has even begun to explore the fallout of a mutually abusive relationship. Fusion is a way of exploring the contours of intimacy, a subject that Orange Is the New Black has always been deeply interested in.
Orange Is the New Black’s first, best season slowly, deliberately widens Piper’s view of the world, critiquing her limited perspective as she grows to learn that, in fact, all of the other woman in prison with her are people too, with their own backgrounds, hopes, dreams, and fears. Steven Universe accomplishes the same trick in its first season—every episode is structured to convey Steven’s point of view (the show rarely, if ever, shows things he hasn’t seen or is being told about). It’s a coming-of-age story that has transformed Steven from a vaguely entitled, irritating child to a strong, kind person capable of forming connections even with Gems who, initially, want to kill him.
This commitment to revealing its characters’ basic humanity is essentially the whole point of Steven Universe—the show’s best character started as a villain, and the last few episodes have hinted at an impending redemption for its current big bad. OITNB, too, makes an effort to humanize many of its worst offenders, treating them as cogs in a system shaped by forces beyond their comprehension. This occasionally fails, as it did in the “shocking” shooting that served as the climax of the show’s most recent season. The spectacle of that moment undercut the dignity and value of the characters involved, a long-boiling tendency that over time might sink the show. But it’s OK. Even when Orange Is the New Black runs out of steam, we’ll still have Steven.
