Patrick Freyne: Given a choice of prisons, I’d take Litchfield over the Big Brother house

When the Facebook algorithm becomes sentient and stalks our world, it will contemplate our weak, fleshy, obsolete forms and put us somewhere secure to toy with us, like in Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Would Scream or the 17th season of Big Brother.

Big Brother is now a mouthless, screaming, rutting shit-fit of a programme. “Be prepared for abusive, highly-offensive language constantly throughout, explosive and aggressive confrontation and extremely risky sexual activity,” says a voice at the outset, and initially I’m not sure if it’s meant to be a warning or an advertisement.

It’s a warning. These days the short one-word review of Big Brother reads: “upsetting”. Big Brother has long left Channel 4 with its “ethics” and “public service values” for Channel 5 (it’s on TV3 in Ireland). There it’s broadcast from a rusty cargo ship in international waters between programmes like Celebrity Russian Roulette and Extreme Monkey Knife Fights.

The world has changed since the early 21st Century. Once upon a time Big Brother contestants had real jobs. They were builders and teacher and florists and coopers and ship’s mates and spinning jenny operators and old curiosity shop proprietors.

That world is dead. For a long time now Big Brother has been made up of multi-hyphenated model-actors and professional body-doubles and dominatrices and reality TV stars and wide boy entrepreneurs and now Marco Pierre White Jr, the scion of some celebrity chef. I think it’s Jamie Oliver. Their hobbies include - voluntary imprisonment, expressing undying love and fealty to people they’ve just met and ramping minor arguments up to shouting matches.

Heavily-tattooed, leopard-skin onesied Marco Pierre White Jr is the breakout star, in the sense that I presume he’s broken out of somewhere. He spends much of his time doing handstands and trying to publically hump things, especially Laura, a reality star who on Sunday engages in some erotic asphyxiation with Marco and on Monday takes her top off and snogs a girl called Evelyn in the Jacuzzi. She has lived a full life.

There are also the twins, Victoria and Emma, who last week escaped the building. On Sunday Victoria returns alone to be granted status as a complete human in her own right (under Endemol law Victoria and Emma were classed as one person). Her sister, she says, has gone to be “with nature and peace,” which sounds awfully like that dog I had who was sent to “live on a farm.”

This year there are two households, one of which is deemed inferior and is populated by housemates known as “The Others”, who spy on, infiltrate and undermine the inhabitants of the main house. The Others let off steam with sporadic weeping, angry screaming (specifically: a young man called Hughie screaming at a woman called Natalie) and by vindictively punishing their neighbours from afar. One day they watch them as they sift through rotten meat and maggots in a haunted attic. On another the housemates are forced to dress as scarecrows while people dressed as medieval plague crows pour goo over their heads (This is a very specific scenario that wasn’t forecast in any of their horoscopes). It makes nobody feel better.

Big Brother is deadeningly boring, depressingly irresponsible and often just disturbing. Yet, as the programme proceeds I’m drawn to the calming disembodied Irish voice that sometimes lures contestants out of their thin shells when they go to weep, rant or gibber in the diary room. I hope this is the form the great algorithm takes when it chooses to reveal itself to me, and not something terrible (like Marco Pierre White Jnr).

Things are much more life-affirming and dignified in Litchfield Prison, the setting of Orange is the New Black (the new series goes up on Netflix on Friday). I love Orange is the New Black. Initially show-runner Jenji Kohan baited viewers with the tale of an atypically-imprisoned middleclass white woman, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), then switched to a more ambitious story about race, class, inequality and gender in America.

Such socio-political heft is rare enough in American drama, though it’s easy to forget this because OITNB wears its significance lightly. Indeed, with its comic stories of hoarded food, bickering rivalries and bittersweet crushes it sometimes resembles a girls’ boarding school story (albeit one featuring poverty, rape, transphobia and human rights abuses).

The original focus on fish-out-of-water Chapman slowly became a joke (and Chapman the least likeable character) because Kohan believes no-one deserves to live in this inhuman system. They’re all fish out of water. Piper isn’t special (“It’s not all about you Chapman,” an inmate tells her in the opening episode of the new series).

There are no minor roles. Bit players and sidekicks can quickly develop into major characters with filled-out back-stories and dramatically-significant plotlines. As a result it has the most diverse spectrum of female characters on television (It’s depressing that it took setting a show in a women’s prison for this to happen). And there are no truly evil characters. Racist, homophobic adversaries like Pennsatucky (the excellent Taryn Manning) are revealed to be victims of poverty and sexual violence, while creepy, ineffectual control-freaks like counsellor Healy (Michael Harney) are shown to be lonely and deeply sad. Everyone is comprehensible, even when their actions aren’t excusable. And no-one is beyond redemption.

If OITNB has a fatal flaw it’s that Kohan understandably likes her characters too much. So she shies away from overly-tragic endings, even when a tragic ending is probable or realistic (I think Poussey survived her downward spiral in Season 2 because Kohan couldn’t bear to harm her).

But even though this takes some of the dramatic energy away, I still love it. The last season eschewed one big story arc for a theme, prison privatisation, and a collection of interlocking, episodic character studies. The new series continues this trend (at least in the first four episodes). It further explores the dehumanising effects of prison and prison privatisation. Authority figures make moral compromises. There are issues with prison overcrowding. Human rights are flaunted in the interest of profit. A celebrity enters the prison. People die. Others strive and sometimes they succeed. Unlike in the doomed halls of Big Brother, in Litchfield Prison there’s always hope.