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Most great television shows don’t start that way. Pilot episodes bear a heavy burden of exposition, and it can take a full season before the writers and cast get a feel for the characters and what works for them. Some manage to catch fire right out of the gate, further raising expectations for a second season. After a surprisingly strong debut on Netflix last year, Orange Is the New Black returns for its sophomore test and proves once again that it features not only some wholly original stories but one of the deepest ensemble casts in series television.
In the first season, engaged yuppie Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling) found herself suddenly serving a yearlong prison term for aiding her former girlfriend, Alex (Laura Prepon), in an international drug smuggling ring ten years earlier. The second season begins with Piper and Alex’s participation at the smuggler’s trial (an event that goes predictably terribly for Piper) before settling into a season-long arc regarding a power struggle at the prison between disgraced former shot-caller Red (Kate Mulgrew) and recently re-incarcerated Vee (Lorraine Toussaint), a street hustler who organizes the black inmates under her uncompromising and manipulative leadership.
Based on Piper Kerman’s memoir, the first season leaned heavily on the fictional Piper as the lead character and audience surrogate for learning about the workings of Litchfield Penitentiary and the women serving time there. While the first few episodes were a bit wobbly, it became apparent pretty quickly that creator Jenji Kohen was working with a much wider brush. Piper may have been our way in, but the show quickly filled with nuanced, complex female characters that overshadowed the frustratingly narcissistic protagonist.
After the Piper-centric first episode, the second season delves deeper into the lives of the other inmates to great reward. From twitchy “Crazy Eyes” Suzanne (Uzo Aduba) to Army brat Poussey (Samira Wiley), Kohen presents each of these characters as their own people with unpredictable and frequently fascinating pasts. The more we get to know them, the harder it becomes to empathize with Piper and her unwavering ability to somehow make everything about her.
While recurring flashbacks flesh out the large ensemble while giving some great storylines to characters who didn’t get much to do in the first season, the ongoing rivalry between Red and Vee allows for more high-stakes dramatic tension. As villains go, Toussaint could hold her own with any of the psychos from HBO’s Oz and probably send a few of them home quivering. By contrast, Mulgrew embraces the opportunity to explore the more vulnerable side of the fierce Russian mama bear.
In the landscape of largely homogenous TV, it’s easy to praise Orange Is the New Black for its talented and ethnically diverse cast of women, but that misses the show’s greatest success. Kohen and her cast have thrown a lot of new characters at the viewer in just two years—yet each one is so sharply drawn and fascinating in her own way that keeping the many stories straight is hardly a challenge. This is a show that is keenly interested in everyone’s unique story, and—long before the last fade-to-orange of the season—so are we.
