What to expect in Orange is the New Black season four

ORANGE is the New Black is back tonight (finally). This is why you should binge it all this weekend.

REVIEW

IT’S that time of the year again and it couldn’t come soon enough to warm our winter cockles.

Orange is the New Black is back tonight and if you’re living on the east coast, this megastorm 2.0 is the perfect excuse to stay in and binge all weekend.

And if you’re living on the west coast or somewhere in between, well, just do it anyway because it’ll be worth it.

And Netflix knows you’ve been hanging out for the new season. According to its data, OITNB is the most rewatched original series on Netflix. It found more than half of OITNB fans have rewatched at least one full season of the dramedy, often in June right before a new season drops.

But you don’t have to rewatch anymore, not when you have brand spanking new episodes to fill your days with.

When we left the Litchfield women at the end of season three, most of them were splashing in the lake in a moment of rare frivolity. Unbeknown to them, busloads of new inmates were about to crash their cell block party.

It’s getting a little crowded in here

Picking up right where it left off, season four plunges headfirst into dealing with the fall-out from the lake, the newbies and a hitman trying to kill Alex in the potting shed.

If you thought Orange is the New Black was flirting with the edge of darkness before, it’s gone full tilt. But don’t worry, in between the stand-offs and social commentary, the series is still dead funny. And now there are more jokes about murder and death.

An infusion of new characters mixes up the status quo of the prison, allowing the writers to make the existing characters very, very uncomfortable. Petty squabbles over personal space, long lines for the bathrooms and bizarre bureaucratic battles are now the order of the day, begging to culminate in a fiery confrontation. As one character aptly puts it: “We are a for-profit prison now, we aren’t people now.”

A highlight is the addition of Judy King, the Martha Stewart-esque character briefly seen at the end of the previous season. She is sassy, cunning and sure to shake things up for Red in a fight for top dog. How Caputo and his overlords bend over backwards for their ‘celebrity’ inmate makes for fun hay?

Face off.

The more OITNB has moved away from focusing on Piper, the better the series has become. Nothing against the character, but it’s always been strongest when it was sharing the love between all the quirky women that occupy this little slice of the world.

OITNB has been lauded over and over again for its commitment to a diversity of faces, voices and stories, plaudits it overwhelmingly deserves. There’s no lip service here. The new characters give the writers a bigger opportunity to explore racial and gender issues with more depth.

So whether you end up watching just one episode or all 13 episodes this weekend, it’s clear why Orange is the New Black remains one of the buzziest shows around.

Orange is the New Black season four is available to stream on Netflix now.

Continue the conversation on Twitter with @wenleima.

Originally published as What to expect in Orange is the New Black season four