Orange is the new black: Shooting the jailbirds

Is it a problem that Orange Is the New Black essentially treats prison like a bad day in high school, the kind that includes both a scary walk to the principal's office and an embarrassing visit to the school nurse?

To put it another way, is Jenji Kohan, creator, executive producer and sometimes writer of the series, which has returned for a second season on Netflix in the US, trying to have it both ways: milking the women's penitentiary setting for pathos and the occasional flash of violence, and then consistently defaulting to light satire and bad hygiene jokes when things threaten to get too real?

Well of course she is, and she's awfully good at it, which explains why the show has been such a resounding success. Come for the comedy and you can also fall for the sentimental back stories and the sheen of relevance provided by the large ensemble of working-class, minority, lesbian and transgender characters.

In exchange, the show promises to remain at the level of magic-realist cable dramedy - no real emotions allowed for more than a few seconds.

That's not a complaint or (solely) a condescending dismissal. It's a description and perhaps a rueful suggestion of what the show could be if it weren't as firmly dedicated to being smart entertainment. But there's a lot to be said for smart entertainment. I suspect I'm not the only viewer who looks back with nostalgia to the macabre whimsy of HBO's Six Feet Under (or, more recently, Showtime's Dexter) and wonders when cable drama got so grim. Orange Is the New Black reminds me in spirit of Six Feet Under, except that it's better and funnier.

The first episode of the new season (six of 13 were made available to US critics) takes the incarcerated heroine, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), out of the upstate New York prison where the show is set and sends her cross-country. Freed from the usual requirement to track multiple storylines, the focus is almost entirely on Chapman.

An authentically spooky opening sequence follows Chapman as she's hauled from her bunk with no explanation and put on a plane, and we see she believes she killed a fellow inmate, Pennsatucky, who she was beating at the end of season one.

The episode is a reminder that the heart of Orange Is the New Black, whether viewers care about it or not, is the moral education of Chapman, her "Piper's progress" through a world in which her self-righteousness, hypocrisy and narcissism are constantly challenged. While Schilling's range is narrow, she's well cast here - she does the appalled comic response well, as when an inmate sitting next to Chapman on the plane (an excellent Lori Petty) offers her some petroleum jelly from the glob she keeps in her ear.

Kohan and her writers, abetted by their excellent cast, know how to leave us laughing. They do it when Chapman learns the crime committed by the male inmate she's cut a deal with and Schilling says: "He's a hit man? Oh, I thought he was a rapist. I'm so relieved." They do it again when the randy lesbian played by Lea DeLaria cuts off her own story about a dog licking something from her hand, curtly saying, "It got weird". As long it keeps getting weird, it will bear watching. - © New York Times News Service

At the time of going to press, DStv had not responded to queries about when they will be scheduling 'Orange is the New Black'