Warning: mild spoilers below for season three of Orange Is the New Black.

Shows have a tendency to start sucking around the third season. That was sure true for The Killing and overwhelmingly true for House of Cards. Maybe it's just that shows exhaust their premises, or that the writers get bored. Orange Is the New Black—one of Netflix's first forays into original programming, and still the defining example of the genre—has escaped this curse. Season three is the best yet. It's probably the best season of television that Jenji Kohan, the showrunner for Weeds before Orange Is the New Black, has ever produced. It's the ideal of her style of television: white people problems seen from below.

If Law & Order was television ripped from the front pages of the New York Post, then Orange Is the New Black (whose third season debuts June 12 on Netflix) is ripped from the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Subjects up for discussion include the trendiness of red velvet cake, the novels of Jonathan Franzen, and whether lingerie is empowering. Piper, of course, is the ultimate cliche of the rich white girl: She is in prison because of a lesbian college fling, and her sentence interrupts her plans for the development of a soap line. The whole of Orange Is the New Black is itself a kind of op-ed piece—a very long, very detailed op-ed on the subject of the disgraceful state of the American prison system.

The third season applies this technique of idea television more broadly than previous seasons. In the opening episode, Mother's Day is underway, and the kaleidoscopic range of characters provides a variety of different perspectives on the reality of being a mother. It reminded me, automatically, of Meghan Daum's new book, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, and the debates that have swirled around it. How are people judged for being mothers? How are people judged by their choice not to be mothers? What about people who claim they don't want to be mothers in their twenties but then change their minds in the their thirties? Is motherhood compatible with being a working person? And so on.

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What Kohan does is take that debate, which is conducted mostly within the confines of the upper middle class, and transfer it to the world of the racially diverse underclass. And the result is fascinating, because the questions are so different. For the poor, motherhood is often not a choice they think through; it is a fate, which is both glorious and soul-destroying. Life, for them, is not a series of decisions, but of events and moments which come at them. For the people who write op-eds, the privileged ones, choice is the defining feature of our moment. In "the real world" that these writers attempt to think through, choice is ephemeral at best. That episode provides an entirely different perspective on the debate that raged over motherhood after Daum's book: For most women, having a baby isn't a lifestyle question. It's something more and less.

COPS used to be one of the few major American TV shows in which you could see poor people. But Orange Is the New Black has found a more humane approach than looking for methheads and waiting for the police to lock them up. The show is about being forced to bridge the gulf that more or less nobody wants to cross anymore—the gulf between the privileged and the underclass. At one point, when the women of Lichfield prison are looking at a lingerie catalogue, they wonder what one of the models' lives must be like. "She eats pills and ice cream and cries in bed and she cuts herself but on her scalp so nobody sees," one of the inmates says. "So her life is still better than ours?" Piper asks. The question is rhetorical. Of course it is.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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