Orphan Black, whose third season begins this week, is the only show on television where you’ll hear this line: “Enjoy your oophorectomy!” The science-fiction series, which airs in the United States on BBC America, is filmed in Ontario and set, oh, somewhere nearby, right about now, in a world where doctors surgically remove the eggs from women’s bodies, freeze them, defrost them, and implant them in the uteruses of other women, or, sometimes, of the same women; sometimes they remove whole ovaries. It depends. The thing is: there are a lot of women. The show’s lush with them. It’s shocking.
Orphan Black stars the prodigiously talented twenty-nine-year-old Tatiana Maslany as a small population of clones. Maslany is the best thing about Orphan Black, with the writing a close second. As revealed in the show’s first two seasons, the characters played by Maslany are the product, or maybe it’s better to call them the progeny, of Project LEDA, a series of experiments conducted in a laboratory in the United Kingdom in the nineteen-eighties by a pair of geneticists named Susan and Ethan Duncan. Their work was illegal, and rather remarkably far ahead of the real-world cloning of Dolly the sheep, in Edinburgh, in 1996. (Over the past several decades, human cloning has been condemned or banned by more than a dozen American states, by many countries, and by the United Nations.) The clones the Duncans created in their laboratory were implanted, as fertilized eggs, into surrogate mothers, and grew up while under secret surveillance by “monitors” employed by the Dyad Institute, a sort of rogue genetics outfit lately headed by an evil clone named Rachel (Maslany), who was raised by the Duncans before their lab was destroyed in a fire that melted the floppy disks containing the genome sequence necessary to make more clones. That said, there’s room to hope that there are more clones still out there, and that Maslany will be able to try out a few more accents, hair styles, wardrobes, and postures. Really, she is breathtaking. Partly, that has to do with her versatility. But it also has to do with scarcity. There are very few good roles for women on television, and Maslany plays nine of them.
Review from New Yorker.com
I spent the beginning of this week binge-re-watching the first four seasons of this show in anticipation of it's fifth and last season. The whole series has been a solid 10 (best of the best) out of 10, for me, in no small part to the talent of Tatiana Maslany, who finally was awarded a long overdue 2016 Emmy for her work (and she was up against some pretty impressive talent). She didn't qualify for a nomination for the 2017 awards, because of the spacing between the 4th and 5th seasons, but I wouldn't be surprised if she doubles downs for last season, and the 2018 Emmys. She's not being overlooked any more! Fellow actors, reviewers, fans, and the industry are all touting her as the greatest actor of her generation. Although Tatiana anchors the show, she has given license to the creators and writers to create to a great diversity of clones, and depth of story - hats off to that team, as well as to the ensemble of actors that allow the storytelling to breath and fill out its world.. One of my favourite show of all time. Rooted in our Canadian acting, writing, producing, and geographic talent. Can't say enough about how good this is. I can't finish this review without mentioning how impressed I have been with how it has addressed a lot of the social issues of our day, by not characaturizing them but seemlessly integrating them into the whole experience of life - the characters are not reduced to one social characteristic, but are whole people trying to figure out life. Well done!
With one of the all-time great pilots, Orphan Black gets off to a smashing start. Subsequent episodes give viewers little time to catch their breath as the plot moves relentlessly forward with twists and turns everywhere. It's a masterpiece of a story, with Tatiana Maslany giving a mesmerizing, mind-bending performance- 4 times over. With impossible sky-high expectations, season 2 drops off slightly in quality, as the writers seem to have been as surprised as everyone else at the show's success.... but the step down is slight. It's still an engaging, enthralling watch. Unfortunately, each subsequent seasons feels like a step backwards, as the curse of the mystery box series begins to creep further in from the edges of the screen. The need to constantly reveal more layers and complexity of the mythology end up sending the story down ever more absurd paths. The glue that holds everything together, however, is Maslany. She carries the show single-handedly through to the end with raw talent and acting that can be argued to be among the greatest in the history of television. And that's not hyperbole. By the end I was shaking my head at the plot, but Maslany kept my eyes glued to the screen.
This is a series that screams, "We were so inspired and got way too popular to keep the story running!" There is a genuine mystery and sense of wonder in the first season that the show takes a hard and fast turn away from after the initial biggest story line gets resolved. There's notes of Pushing Daisies or quirk of Wonderfalls when it started off much darker and with deeper intrigue. While Tatiana should be commended for her ability to make separate characters, the writers seem to turn some of them into parodies of themselves. Their behavior stops looking so much like individuals contributing to a larger world and more like an accent or outfit that shows up from time to time and begins to blend in. I think it just got confused or decided to be more ambitious without fully grasping what made it compelling in the first place. A shuffle game of "What's this clone up to?" is not the mystery of their origin or just how dramatically they may differ, and even then, when you switch from slowly letting that story unfold to ONE BIG REVEAL after another, I guess it just stopped feeling dangerous. It became about the gimmick of "how many roles can she play?" more than the story having any teeth.
Review by LehuaBlockedParent2014-08-13T14:32:32Z
I'm on s2ep6 and I don't understand why some people gave it such bad reviews.. The show had to evolve in season 2, I think the direction is just as interesting. I started with s1ep1 yesturday and binged it. I read reviews before starting new shows I binge so anyone considering watching this show.. It Is Fucking Awesome! And I watch alot of tv.