Jenji Kohan, the creator of Netflix's new hit series Orange Is The New Black, had to grapple with a pretty serious conundrum: How do you make a compulsively watchable series about a milieu whose defining characteristic is boredom? And yet, the show's writers have pulled it off.

Of course, they have had to take some liberties; the series is based on Piper Kerman's memoir but is highly fictionalized. So what did they get right about prison life, and what did they miss?

Though my year in federal prison was quite unlike Piper Kerman's — largely on account of the differences between men's and women's prisons — here's my assessment of where Orange nailed it and where it missed the mark.