Coming soon on the small screen

‘Orange’ returns, while truth is stranger than fiction.

By HANNAH BROWN
‘Orange’ (photo credit: PR)
‘Orange’
(photo credit: PR)
The ladies of Litchfield Prison are back – or at least they will be soon, when Orange Is the New Black returns on June 18. The entire fourth season of the series will be available on HOT Xtra VOD for free starting on that date (it is produced by Netflix, which releases all episodes of new seasons of its series on the same day) and on HOT Plus from Sunday through Thursday at 10:50 p.m. starting on June 19.
Here’s some OITNB news: The show will run for three more seasons following this one, all the way through a seventh season.
Uzo Aduba, the breakout star of this ensemble show, won her second Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress last year. However, her 2014 Emmy for OITNB was in the comedy category, while her 2015 Emmy was in the drama category. It’s clear from her wins in these different categories for performing the same character on the same show that no one quite knows how to categorize it, which may explain why the show has won relatively few awards so far.
Season Three ended with a cathartic moment, when workers left a hole in the prison fence and inmates stepped out to swim in a nearby lake. Cindy (Adrienne C. Moore), the inmate who had been trying to convert to Judaism, was finally able to immerse herself in a body of running water and become a Jew instead of just Jew-ish.
Not that much is known yet about the plot. In this new season, the inmates have to come to grips with more fallout from being purchased by a for-profit corporation, including 100 new prisoners.
Most of the core cast, both inmates and prison staff, will be back. One character who was introduced briefly last season but who will now have a much bigger role is Blair Brown, who plays Judy King, a celebrity chef a la Martha Stewart who becomes an inmate.
Matthew Weiner, the writer/ producer who created Mad Men (which went off the air a little over a year ago) has directed one episode of OITNB, and it’s the first time he has directed a show that he did not write.
This extraordinarily entertaining series has become so ingrained in the culture that it has even inspired an episode of The Simpsons, the season finale, which aired earlier this week, called “Orange Is the New Yellow.”
Marge Simpson goes to prison and discovers it’s a vacation compared to life with Homer.
Docaviv, the Tel Aviv International Documentary Festival, is currently on, and throughout the month of June YES Docu will be featuring some of the films that are being shown there.
All the films will be shown on YES VOD in addition to being aired on YES Docu.
Death in the Terminal is a film by Tali Shemesh and Asaf Sudry about the attack on the bus station in Beersheba in October 2015 in which an asylum seeker from Eritrea was lynched when he was mistaken for the terrorist. It will be shown on June 1 at 10 p.m. and June 4 at 10:30 p.m.
The Editor, directed by Gilad Tocatly, tells the story of Dov Judkowski, an Auschwitz survivor who became one of Israel’s most influential newspaper editors. It will be aired on June 8 at 9 p.m. and June 11 at 10:30 p.m.
Roy Cohen’s Machine of Human Dreams will be aired on June 15 at 9 p.m. and June 18 at 10:30 p.m. It’s a futuristic story that sounds more like some recent television series and movies, such as AMC’s Humans, than a documentary. Ben Goertzel is an eccentric technology guru who has dedicated his life to developing a program modeled on the human brain. He received a grant from Hong Kong in 2014 to put his artificial intelligence software into a robotic body so that it could interact with the physical world. In order to fulfill his vision, Ben recruited a team of unconventional experts, but the work proved far more challenging and controversial than he thought.