A crime she committed in her youthful past sends Piper Chapman to a women's prison, where she trades her comfortable New York life for one of unexpected camaraderie and conflict in an eccentric group of fellow inmates.
This tv show contains 137 potentially triggering events.
A character outside prison abandons an inmate he is in a relationship with (and he's also the father of her child), never to be seen again. It deeply affects the inmate for the rest of the show.
S3: A character abandons his gf and unborn child.
S5: The mother of said child gives away the child for adoption.
S7: A former inmate has a child but is never shown reunited with them after netting out and later gets deported. The season shows multiple cases in which children are separated from their parents in deportation processes.
In S3E2, Cesar lashes out at the teenage boy he raises and threatens him with a gun. I think he also hits his gf once, but I don't remember which episode.
During the riot in S5, some inmates abuse the guards.
Aleida was pimped out by her mother and Aleida is a terrible mother herself (but more in the sense of being neglectful and emotionally abusive).
Late in S2, a character severely beats up another, and a character is hit in the head/face with a lock in a sock. In early S4, we see a Latina character pushed down a flight of stairs by, iirc, a group of white supremacists (but I don't think she was beaten). Later in S4, a trans woman is ganged up and beaten by a group of transphobes and I think some of it is explicit. There are more such beatings but not on screen. There are also several scenes in which a bullied person explicitly beats up their bully (the scenes that come to mind are at the very end of S1E13, in late S4 and in early S7). Some characters are shown with bad facial injuries after the beatings.
There are multiple times where people are held down or against things. It’s also a prison show, people are sometimes in handcuffed/locked in cells or rooms.
S1E10, S2E4, S310(this one is through out the episode and very graphic on screen sexual assault.) S5E2(noises mostly), S5E10(in flashbacks for the guard), S6E1.
A character's long hair is cut whilst she's asleep by another inmate.
A character has her hair razored off by a guard as a form of torture/to break her.
In the S1 finale, a character cuts the palm of their hand. Somewhere around the middle of the series, a character accidentally cuts off their fingertip while working in the kitchen, but it's only talked about, not shown. In S5, a character loses part of their finger due to an accidental gunshot.
SPOILER:
A character dies of an overdose prior to being left in a closet with drugs. Realizing she's dead, a guard hangs her to make it seem like she hung herself.
S5E7 the inmates take off a guards thumb. The scene doesn’t show the removable process but the finger wrapped in gauze. An inmate gets a finger shot off and there is a lot of talk of cutting off another finger to attach to the inmates wound.
In the episode where Suzanne takes the little boy to her home she ends up scaring him so much that he backs off to the balcony and accidentally falls off the ledge.
Not mutilation but in s2e3 when Morello is on the phone with her sister, she gets really upset and her left eye turns kinda grody red like she popped some blood vessels or something. Not a super gross thing but might be triggering for some
The overarching story of S3E2 is a bedbug infestation that affects the whole prison. Plus, a lice outbreak happens in S6E3 but it's only a few minutes. No bugs are shown.
S5E8: A character turns herself in so that others are not (indirectly) punished for what they did.
S6E4: A character allows another to testify against them to save themselves.
piper cheats on larry with alex. larry cheats on piper with polly. polly cheats on her husband with larry. morello kinda cheats on christopher with nicky. alex cheats on piper with a guard. piper cheats on alex with some randomers and zelda. diaz cheats on hopper with cesar. judy king cheats on her husband and boyfriend with yoga and a guard. fig cheats on her husband with caputo. alex cheats on her gf.
a complete list of times to skip:
S1E8: 2min,
S1E11: 2min,
S2E4: 46min,
S2E10: 49min50sec,
S3E13: 8min and 1hr5min,
S4E9: 18min,
S4E10: 58min,
S4E11: 24min, 41min and 50min,
S5E5: 14min and 15min,
S5E12: 13min and 45min,
S6E3: 23min and 31min,
S6E11: 4min,
there is none in series 7.
Cops and guards are critically depicted. Some get somewhat humanizing backstories, but these won’t make the viewer think “yay, police!” - rather, they make you realize that ACAP is about more than awful individual cops, it’s about an entire power and justice system being faulty.
S3E10, in a flashback, Doggett bleeds on a couch when she unexpectedly has her first period.
Graphic discussions as the prison is short on hygiene products.
Also, if that counts, one character bleeds after giving birth and another before.
Suzanne becoming violent due to mental illness is a recurring plot point.
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A mentally ill character plants an explosive device under someone's car.
/
In Season 2 Episode 1, a character mentions biting her girlfriend's tongue off and swallowing it due to "manic rage."
Arguable; the character "Crazy Eyes" appears to, possibly, be autistic, but to my knowledge this is not confirmed. Throughout the story she is a victim of ableism.
There is also a running joke using the r slur.
No, but the timeline got messed up when the writers applied a floating timeline to the show even though the show clearly is supposed to have a set timeline defined by Piper's DOB+age and explicitly mentioned prison sentences.
It’s a running theme that the inmates are living in cramped conditions. Several people shoved in a room. As well as several guards shoved in one small room.
A number of guards have PTSD following their treatment during the riot. One female guard in particular suffers very badly, to the extent of self harming herself.
A character is briefly shown underwater near the end of the S3 finale. Another character's head is forced into a toilet in S6, and it's shown from inside the toilet.
A character breaks into the prison and there are many eery shots of empty hallways or doors where we later find out most of the characters were being watched and then kidnapped/restrained. Some inmates watch others while they sleep, most noticeably in first season.
No, but a pregnant character bleeds heavily in labor and it’s unclear initially if everything is okay, which may be triggering to miscarriage survivors.
There is a lot of talk about it when an inmate becomes pregnant but (SPOILER) she keeps it
pennsatucky has had many abortions and performs a small funeral for them on mother’s day.
There is a whole story arc where inmates try to get kosher meals and pretend to be Jewish. A character does convert and become Jewish but several other inmates treat her poorly for it. Other Jewish inmates outside of the one who has converted are subject to lots of name calling and mistreatment.
ooh boy where to start
the short answer is yes and this is why i stopped watching the show, the long answer....
1) jokes about all the black innmates being on crack
2) crazy russian lady stereotype
3) a black lesbian nicknamed "crazy eyes" who becomes a violent stalker and tries to force a straight white woman into a relationship with her
that's just the stuff i can remember off the top of my head from watching it ages ago but probably best to assume that if there's a character from a minority group they will probably be misrepresented
Pennsatucky was hyperreligious in S1. Sister Ingalls was a nun and brings up religion and spirituality quite often throughout the show. She also has a flashback in which we see her as a nun. One episode in S3 has flashbacks focusing on multiple characters' relationship to God. Throughout S3, Judaism is discussed a lot. S3 also has a story line involving a cult and reveals that a character grew up Amish. S6 shows a Bat Mitzvah, but religion is not the main focus of the scene.
S2E12. V isn’t by blood related to the people she takes care of, but the man she sleeps with tells her that “your basically my mom. You raised me” an incest joke is made at S6E4
During the riot a guard has a stroke (I think triggered by an injection or injury from the inmates). It's shown in detail and the guard's face has clear signs of having had a stroke.
The show itself seems to be pro-choice (a character is given an abortion pill and this is viewed as positive) but there is at least one character who becomes very Christian and I believe is anti-abortion
The episodes always finish with a fade to an orange screen and all that follows is the credits, usually with a song playing over them that relates to the final scene of the episode. The one exception is an episode that fades to black instead.
More blood than gore. There are several fights that break out and cause blood. There are scenes of finger mutilation, characters getting badly stabbed, shot, and injuries causing blood to pour