The Foster's is the New Black

I'm a tv addict and a pretty picky one. There are a lot of shows and movies where I like the plot and the idea of the story, but I can't seem to get hooked into watching them which is the annoying part as I'd like to watch as much as I can, but I usually just end up watching a repeated shows and movies, ones that I've seen enough times to remember a lot of words.

If you're into shows that have deep meanings and wise lessons to learn, my 2 favourite are "The Fosters" and "Orange is the New Black", so if you love one of these shows, you're sure to love the other!

The similarities between these two shows both involve crime, injustice, racism, sexism, foster/adoption system, immigration system, romance, LGBT+, wisdom, a lot of information about this unfair world we live in, lots of drama, a fair few laughs, characters that evolve throughout the shows, and many tears over sadness, joy and powerful characters.

If you have Netflix you would of come across "Orange is the New Black". It is about a woman's prison, and each episode show's flashbacks of people's lives showing us why they act the way that they do, why they're in prison and/or where they come from, a lot of the prisoners come from poor backgrounds, including living in foster care and/or getting adopted (like in The Foster's). The show has SO many characters, with so many stories and backgrounds, enough to learn a lot of wise things, just like The Foster's do.

It starts off with a woman called Piper who comes from a rich background, engaged to a man, and in prison for moving a bag of drug money for her girlfriend at the time who worked for an international drug cartel, after 10 years she was finally caught by her ex girlfriend from the time Alex who named her to the Fed's and they both got sent to the same prison. Piper gets judged instantly from all the prisoners because she looks and in fact comes from a privileged life. Her "foot in mouth disease" buys her her first drama by insulting the chef of the cafeteria kitchen who is a Russian lady called Red. She begs Red for forgiveness, but Red what's to see her be strong and not let her off by being weak, so she starves Piper out until she can make it up to Red.

Red is the prison mommy of the White women, the prison is quite racial where everyone just hangs out with people within their own race, mostly split between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics and Other (mostly Asians).

Something I love about this show, is you can't have attached feelings to any character, as every single one of them changes one way or another, you might start off loving one character, but then by season 4 you might hate that character or visa versa.

The show shows the prison over the series go from being in minimum security prison, the struggles of trying to keep a prison secure and safe, then the prisoners riot over so much disrespect and abuse from the guards that ends up killing a lovely inmate for no reason and the riot starts off with an inmate shooting a guard, it goes for 3 days ending with a set up by the swat team blaming the inmates for a murder that was created by the swat team and 2 poor innocent woman get blamed with a life sentence for it, half of the prisoners from minimum/riot gets sent to the local maximum security prison and the other half get sent to other prisons around the country.

The last season shows the unfairness from the immigration centres, where they are so much worse than prison and get unfair court trails where they can't legally look for a lawyer, and get taken out of the US and back to their own country at random times. The main characters from maximum get sent to work as cooks for the immigration centres and help the poor immigrants find lawyers and call their families with their smuggled in phones.

Unfairness with racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and more from the guards, counsellors, wardens and other staff members on the inmates, even some of the inmates treat other inmates like that, and that's why the inmates have their little racial or "tribal" families to look out for each other, luckily they aren't all bad like that, there are some inmates and staff members that don't care for that disrespectful manor and is friendly with everyone.

So you've read a little on Piper and Red, here are some of the other characters and a little of what they're like:

Sophia is a transgender woman who has a son from when she was a man and still married to the mother, she's very proud of being transgender, but sadly other inmates are not, some just get annoyed by how much she talks about the change and design, (and is mentioned that she shows off her vagina off a lot too) others are just transphobic and like to pick on and beat her up.

Aleida is the mother of Dayanara, they're both in prison for drugs, working for Aleida's boyfriend Ceasar. Dayanara and a guard called Bennett fall in love and get pregnant, they decide to keep the baby but have to make up the right story so then Bennett doesn't get caught, so as Red wants revenge on a guard nicknamed Pornstache as he has been causing trouble with sex and drugs with the inmates, they set up Pornstache to get him fired by getting Dayanara to have sex with him and get caught so when she tells the warden she's pregnant she can blame it on Pornstache and not Bennett, but then there's so much more drama with figuring out where the baby's gonna live and Bennett eventually disappears leaving Dayanara to deal with the baby situation. Aleida gets out of prison leaving Daya, Daya feels lost without her mum and when the riot starts she shoots a guard and begins to lose her mind, and after she kills her girlfriend in maximum, she becomes the prison gang leader, acting heaps tough like a gangster. Aleida comes back to prison in the last season after damaging the property of one of her daughter's boyfriend who is an adult taking drug and her daughter is only 13, so it obviously makes her very angry and lands her back in prison.

Nicky, the hot lesbian junkie, as she is stereotypically called, she has a witty humour and is always craving but never wants to take heroin again, eventually she goes through some crap that gets her sent to maximum before the riot and she comes back to minimum high and loaded off heroin from being so angry at why she got sent to maximum. She is a lovable character, and is crazy in love with another inmate Lorna who is a little mentally insane as she is crazy in love with a man she stalked and got herself thrown into prison for it, when Nicky is in maximum Lorna gets lonely and starts to date penpals during visiting hours and she eventually marries one of the men who gets her pregnant, and it breaks Nicky's heart when she comes back to minimum to see the love of her life married and pregnant to a man.

Suzanne or better known as "Crazy Eyes", she is another lovable character and has won the most awards on the show as her character has some mental problems and starts off by bringing on the prison stereotype to be Piper's prison wife who obsessively follows her everywhere and fights anyone who bothers Piper. She starts off looking and acting very intense with being very obsessive, her eyes poking out of her head (as to why she has the nickname "Crazy Eyes") and a very sexual mind and writing a pornographic story that a lot of inmates become fans of, eventually you see that she's a very gentle, wise and loving old soul.

Tiffany "Pennsatucky" Doggett starts off as a crazy Christian who wants to fight and kill Piper, but in season 3 she starts to mellow out, realises a lot of stuff, loses the friends she had before who end up torturing her throughout the riot and becomes friends with the big butch lesbian Boo who sticks up for her, especially when she gets raped by a guard who Tiffany had built a bond with and his feelings got out of hand where he raped her and Boo is a big fan of revenge and pulled "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" on him meaning she rapes him back with a broomstick with Tiffany.

Sam Healy is the counselor for the inmates, he is a racist and a misogynist which doesn't go well when counselling female inmates. He only respects a few inmates, everyone else he treats poorly. But you do end up sympathizing for him as it also shows us his back story of having a mother who is mentally ill as she sees and hears things that aren't there, in that sense he is good at helping women who are like that as he has experience in dealing with that and is the reason why he chose to counsel people. When he was young his father told him that lesbianism is a bad disease so he always looked down on lesbians saying that they are sick and dangerous people.

There is so many great, lovable and interestingly crazy characters in this show and with so much going on, it makes it too hard to resist. The depth to this show makes it full of wisdom, to make you have empathy and sympathy towards the characters and to understand a world you may not know anything about.

So if you love "Orange Is The New Black" for that reason, you're sure gonna love "The Foster's".

The Foster's shows the deep dramatic side of the fostering/adopting and juvenile world. Where 4 out of the 5 teenagers in the family are adopted by the Foster family and one kid is the biological son of one of the 2 mum's that are now lesbian, who had the kid from a past marriage with a man who also helps looks after the kids when needed and the 2 also work together as police officers (I know it's complicated, which makes it a great story).

The show starts off with 2 of the teens (Callie the older sister of Jude the younger brother) being fostered by the Foster family, after Callie gets out of juvie and tries to get Jude back from a past Foster home with an abusive foster father. After they lived in 7 different foster homes after their mum died and their dad went to prison for drunk driving and manslaughter of their mother and other people, Callie didn't feel worthy enough to be adopted so she rebelled a lot and there were traumas created in the old foster homes. Jude gets angry whenever Callie rebels because that's what usually gets them moved to another foster home, but the Foster's mother's grew attached to Callie and Jude and did whatever they could to keep them in the family. When Callie starts to grow up and be more mature, she uses her powerful passion to fight for what's right and to fight against what is wrong with the foster system and stand up for juvinile justice. Jude is the sweetest, kindest and wisest child of all, being the youngest he has seen it all from a rebellious sister, lessons from a dead mum, an imprisoned dad and 7 foster homes. He is going through puberty throughout the show and also learning about his sexuality, by falling in love with his best friend Connor who has a dad who isn't homophobic but he just doesn't understand people being gay and worried about how the world treats Connor yet he's the only person who treats him badly, eventually Connor moves away to his mum's in California because of it. Jude then dates another boy who gets murdered, he then questions his sexuality again thinking he's cursed and sees what it's like to kiss his best friend Taylor who's a girl but then she sets him up with this sweet boy from a church group she goes to.

The other 2 adopted teens are twins (Mariana and Jesus who are Latino) who came from a young drug addicted mother who couldn't look after them and has gotten back in contact to take money from her biological kids for drugs but tells them it's for help. The two mainly have fights over Jesus sleeping with/dating Mariana's close friends which make Mariana very uncomfortable and eventually dates one of Jesus's friends. Eventually the show changed the actor who plays Jesus from Jake T. Austin to Noah Centineo in season 3. I personally reckon Noah plays Jesus much better than Jake as I don't think Jake could pull off much drama and didn't seem to play him as seriously as Noah did. In season 4 Jesus gets a TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) and Noah plays it so well. Mariana is a very beautiful girl who tries to hide how much of a brainiac she is so she could fit in and be more popular, eventually she dates this guy called Matt she meets when they all check out Brandon's future band with Matt. Anyway Matt can empathise with Mariana being that he never knew his dad either and he teaches her a lot especially the part of being proud to be yourself as she always tried to fit in which makes her lose who she is and Matt supports her to be her truest self, sadly her drunk self is unfaithful.

The biological son (Brandon the oldest and one of the Fosters mother's Stef's biological son) is a very talented pianist, who ends up falling in love with his new Foster sister Callie as they're convinced that she won't get adopted (eventually she does). Since the arrival of Callie and Jude, Brandon starts to rebel by stealing money, having secrets to hide, and making fake ID's which eventually stirs up some trouble where someone smashes his hand, and he can't play piano the same as he used to which gives him the chance to think of plan B, which is being in Matt's band, then before they start a tour he gets accepted into a classical music program that gets him into the junior symphony and accepted into Julliard then hw quickly gets kicked out of Julliard before starting the school year.

One of the mothers Stef (the biological mother of Brandon) is very strong mentally and emotionally, she can get very snappy, but in the most caring way possible, she is a cop and partnered on the job with her ex husband Mike (who is the father of Brandon) who she only married to make her strictly Christian father happy, sadly breaking Mike's heart when she met Lena (the other Foster mother) who she fell deeply in love with and having to divorce Mike to be with Lena.

Lena is a gentle wise mix cultured woman who has always struggled being a lesbian and biracial as her mum thinks Lena doesn't know what it feels like to be a black woman in America because her mother is full black African American and her father is an American Caucasian man. She is the vice principal of the teens school, and she is thrown around so much in the workplace that the school protests to make Lena the principal as she has the most genuine reasons to lead the school.

The last few episodes of the series is skipped ahead a few years into the future showing how different all their lives are after the kids graduation.

The show has a spin-off series called "Good Trouble" about Mariana and Callie moving into a commune in LA after getting the jobs that they studied for in college, Callie got a clerkship as a lawyer for a judge she disagrees with and it makes her really busy, when she has time off she has sex with a hot Latino guy in the commune that Mariana has a crush on. Mariana works in a software company where there is so much sexism and racism, but her passion for justice in fighting for what's right successfully changes all of that, though because she gets paid more than she's used to, she ends up having too much fun spoiling Callie and herself all the way into a credit card debt. Throughout the series, their immediate family all get to be a guest star one member (and the mom's) at a time.

As you can see, there is a lot of drama set up and plenty more (you didn't even read half of it), a lot of wise words and lessons in this beautiful show, the family are such deep, wise, beautiful souls, and I love that they have the occasional family dance party after an emotional episode, and it is the reason why I love it so much, because they are all so loving and caring of each other.loving and caring of each other.