From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell.

Orange is a new black feels like the most contemporary thing on television. Those are the words of Matthew Winer in Rolling Stone about the series Orange's New Black, which just completed its first season on Netflix. Its creator, Genji Cohan, is back here. So good to see you again. Welcome back. Thank you. I'm happy to be here. It does feel contemporary. One of the things that Matt says it makes it feel so contemporary is you depart from your lead

to go into the lives of the other people, so it gives us a chance to really, in the emotional

terms, buy into this show.

First of all, tell the audience what Orange's New Black is.

So Orange is the New Black is based on a book by Piper Kerman, who was a young lady graduate

of Smith College, an East Coast kind of waspy Americana girl next door, who spent a year

in federal prison for a drug-related crime she had committed soon after college. It's sort of private Benjamin

goes to prison in a lot of ways. And I read this book. My friend Sarah sent it to me, and she

knew Piper, and she said, you're going to love this. You're going to want to do something with

this. And she was absolutely right. What struck me even more

than just Piper's story were the stories she captured of the women she spent time with. The detail

and the humanity she wrote about what was beautiful and fascinating to me. And I went after her,

and I went after the book. And she came to my office.

And I think I was supposed to sell myself. But instead, I was, I was just peppering her with questions for an hour.

You were being ginger. You were being you. That's what you're right. I was just dying to know who these people were and what they'd done and all the stuff that wasn't on the page.

I wanted to know more.

And I guess it convinced her that I was really invested in the material, which I was.

I love this opportunity to present all these women from every walk of life who are forced to deal with one another.

It's also I found, and you've obviously said this before,

but it's a way to subvert what we see on television by taking an archetype,

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