Orange Is the New Black: Season 2 (2014)

Season 2 of Orange Is The New Black opens in quite a disorienting way. Virtually nobody from the first season apart from Piper appears in the first episode, while she’s almost absent from the second. In the first season, she always felt on the verge of being decentred – in fact, being displaced into the wider community of the prison almost felt like a lesson she had to learn, the best way for her to stop regarding herself as the protagonist of whatever situation she happened to fall into. In some ways, season 2 makes good on that promise, sketching a much broader and more systematic vision of prison life than season 1, as well as fleshing out a number of characters who felt tantalisingly underused the first time around. At one level, that change was necessitated by the departure of Laura Prepon, who plays Piper’s ex-girlfriend Alex, from a top-billed role. Their relationship was almost the best thing about the series, so it’s fortunate that Prepon has agreed to return for every episode of season 3, but in the meantime Piper is a little too denuded without Alex – or fiancee Jim, played by Jason Biggs – to sustain the show on her own. Instead, she slips even further into a deadpan or dissociative counterpoint to the world around her, which feels much more relaxed and laidback this time around, ebbing and flowing with the slow sombience of low-security lockup. That also moves it much closer to sitcom, one of the most reliable and time-tested genres for dissociating different species of domesticity from the reassuring fantasies of middle-class whiteness, something Piper still finds impossible to resist. And the indefinite time of sitcom works quite well with the indefinite time of Netflix’s series-events – in fact, this whole season has enough of a break from the main story to really allow it to luxuriate in that odd sense of time, heightening its attention to the quotidian rhythms and gestures of the inmates, their odd ways of deferring waiting for a reprieve that may never arrive, until it feels a bit like a portrait of the precariat, dispatches from a new world order that pivot the story around generous, profoundly comic gestures of solidarity and support. Perhaps that’s why the flashbacks never grate, even though they’re even more prevalent than ever – they haunt the series like echoes from a pre-apocalyptic past, as does pretty much every sequence shot outside FCI Litchfield, especially Piper's episode-long furlough. By the end, you can see how season 3 will return to the main story – there’s the first murmurs of an investigation into the prison’s management structure – but for now season 2 is a delicious interlude, distilling some of the most intriguing moments in season 1.