“Everything is different, the second time around.”
Different, yeah. Better, fuck yeah. Welcome back, “Orange Is the New Black.” Like many of you, I spent this past weekend wolfing down the second season of OITNB. Hell, I took a vacation day on Friday and watched the whole damn thing in less than 24 hours. After the delirious high of binging on the show, I can say without hesitation that not only is Season 2 as good as the first season, it’s actually much better.
Richer. More complex. Deeply satisfying.
The stories have grown beyond the fish-out-of-water introductions of the first season – the, look, this is how you make prison shower shoes novelty of it all – to peer deeply into the complicated physics at work between all these different women forced to pass the time together.
Everything you complained about the first season (let’s be honest – it was mostly Piper and Larry) is better the second time around. And it’s better because Piper is no longer the sun around which the other stories revolve. While Season 1 did an admirable job of bringing us interesting and engaging secondary characters, they really, really get to shine in their own solar systems in the second season.
This is a show where the other characters, particularly the woman of color, are not just set pieces but the legitimate heroes, or antiheroes as the case may be, of their own stories. And this is major. 
Just like with people, you can tell a lot about a TV show with how it treats its supporting cast. Are they props to bolster the lead character – offer advice, act sassy, look dumb? Or are they real people with their own agency and own universes? OITNB allows so many of its celestial bodies to live in their own, distinct orbits. It’s how they crash into each other and skip past each other and everything else that makes it all so freaking fascinating.
So in Season 2 we get less of Piper (meh) and Larry (yay) and Alex (aww) and Doggett (praise be). But more of Taystee and Poussey and Morello and Mendoza and Daya and Sister Ingalls and Miss Rosa and so on. It’s a trade I will happily make. While it’s nearly lesbian sacrilege to say, I didn’t actually miss Alex Vause all that much. Because, despite her limited screentime, she was still very much a part of the story. And, for reasons now clear to everyone, she will most definitely be back next year.
Her departure and the dimming of other storylines allows time for returning and new characters (like Vee and Soso) to bring multitudes to the screen. Hell, this season even brings nuance to its prison staff – who before were largely just caricatures of ineptitude. Yes, this show is that good.
And what you learn from watching a show like this, sitting for 13 uninterrupted hours on your couch, is the familiar refrain - what fools these mortals be. It is our shared strange and lonely and wondrous folly that makes us so very human. And, as with the night sky, our beauty comes not from just one shining star burning bright against the darkness, but the vastness of all our lights shining in unison. 
p.s. Right, so are you ladies (and discerning gentlemen) interested in by episode reviews/recaps on here at all? Or is that OITNB overkill? If there is even such a thing for a show you watched the entirety of while wearing the same sweatpants.