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Critic Reviews
TV Guide Magazine
Season 4 Review:
"Orange loses little steam in its fourth tour of duty, with extremes of dark comedy and bitter tragedy, often heartbreaking in its depiction of metal illness and addiction, devastating in its escalation of racial conflict after the prison's cold-blooded new corporate owners flood the cell block with new bodies, triggering a demographic power shift. [27 Jun - 10 Jul 2016, p.15]"
Season 4 Review:
"It’s the show’s best season, and, along with season 4 of The Americans, one of the best seasons of an ongoing drama of the past year."
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Season 4 Review:
"Once the show establishes its new rhythm, one in which it’s impossible to guess who or what the next scene will consist of, Orange is thrillingly off-kilter."
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Season 3 Review:
"After 26 episodes, it's as funny, moving, compelling, and fresh as ever."
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Season 3 Review:
"Orange remains as sharp and funny and poignant as ever.... It's one of TV's very best shows, no matter how you slice it."
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Season 3 Review:
"Season 3 is an utterly confident mix of gritty comedy and affecting, underplayed drama."
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Season 2 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black remains a vibrantly hued, singular achievement. Darkly dramatic and comedically spiked, it deals in the dehumanization and restoration of both guards and inmates."
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Season 2 Review:
"Everybody inside and outside of Litchfield’s walls matters. That shouldn’t feel revolutionary. That it does speaks both to how essential this show is and how much most other TV shows will have to do to catch up to it."
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Season 2 Review:
"Season two of Orange Is the New Black delivers immediately, stays relevant and entertaining, and gives the impression that it has learned a lot of life lessons inside the system."
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Season 2 Review:
"n terms of character and ambitious writing and acting, Orange Is the New Black is certainly one of the best shows going, however you choose to watch it"
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Season 2 Review:
"TV--or whatever it is we're calling Netflix--doesn't get much better than that."
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Season 2 Review:
"Through the six episodes of the second season made available to critics, it's clear that Orange is not only as great as it was the first season, but arguably even better.... It's terrific."
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Season 2 Review:
"Audacious plot lines help to keep Orange Is the New Black so unusual and refreshing. It's the one prison show that you may never want to escape."
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Season 2 Review:
"Judging by the first six episodes, this round is just as addicting as the first, the ensemble rising to the occasion of topping their first outting. "
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Season 2 Review:
"Creator Jenji Kohan (“Weeds”) continues to tell the fascinating stories of women rarely seen on “TV” in season two."
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Season 2 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black might be the closest thing we have to Charles Dickens right now: a sharp denunciation of an arcane system, driven by hardscrabble characters with whimsical names that define who they are and what they like."
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Season 1 Review:
"In Jenji Kohan’s magnificent and thoroughly engrossing new series, Orange Is the New Black, prison is still the pits. But it is also filled with the entire range of human emotion and stories, all of which are brought vividly to life in a world where a stick of gum could ignite either a romance or a death threat."
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Season 1 Review:
"Schilling, Prepon and Mulgrew are uniformly terrific throughout, whether in prison garb or flashback civilian clothes. But other characters are equally compelling, giving this series innumerable stories to tell for hopefully many seasons to come. Based on the first six of 13 episodes, Orange is the New Black has passed virtually every test with flying colors."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange is one of the best new programs of the year, and the six episodes I've seen have left me hungry to see more."
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Season 1 Review:
"In every case, there is an abiding feeling for character and authenticity that helps elevate Orange Is the New Black to a new definition of television excellence."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange is teeming with humor, heart and poignancy--all the elements needed to qualify it as one of the summer's must-see shows."
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Season 4 Review:
"Based on the first six episodes of the 4th season, OITNB remains fresh, funny/sad, smart, inventive, well-written, and particularly well-acted."
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Season 3 Review:
"Everything operates on a slightly heightened plane, one that ensures that the show is the most dramedy-ish dramedy on television, and one that ensures that Orange is not for everyone. But for those who love this world, it's truly addictive. "
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Season 3 Review:
"Season 3 of Orange might be a slow peel with some sour bites, but its overwhelming richness reaffirms its standing as one of television’s ripest, zestiest shows."
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Season 2 Review:
"There isn’t another show that can go from laugh-out-loud funny to soul-crushing sadness in a beat."
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Season 2 Review:
"If you loved last season, there's nothing so far to indicate you won't like the second just as much."
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TV Guide Magazine
Season 7 Review:
"There are moments throughout the 13 episodes when you might also wish to seek release, but don't bail before the poignant final bows over the credits, which reminds us what a remarkable and diverse ensemble once wire the orange. [22 Jul - 4 Aug 2019, p.7]"
Season 7 Review:
"This closing run of 13 episodes is the most focused season in years, a steady reminder of how smartly political, energetically funny and devastatingly dramatic this show could be."
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Season 5 Review:
"Nothing ever feels forced or repetitive about the show and its confined setting. In fact, it feels like the restriction has spurred even more creativity from the writers this year. There’s a fear and a scrappy anger to the dialogue and interactions happening around the prison, even more so than before. "
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Season 4 Review:
"The new status quo and even more skewed power balances within the prison doesn’t just test every single character. It pushes all of them to their limits, and eventually throws them right the hell off the cliff they’ve been teetering on the edge of."
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Season 4 Review:
"This fourth season is not pretending that things are funnier or more upbeat than they really are. Either by accident or design, Kohan and her team have found a way to pull the rug out from under its audience, with a sudden reminder of the horrors of mass incarceration."
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Season 4 Review:
"[Orange is the New Black] still manages to feel resonant and important three years in."
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Season 4 Review:
"Season 4 is so rich and dense with characters, backstories and subplots that some of its more interesting new additions remain mere teases. As always, the flashbacks remain the strongest aspects of the series."
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Season 4 Review:
"The series’ scope has never been broader, nor its ambition more apparent."
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Season 4 Review:
"The remarkable thing is that, even with a bigger cast, Kohan never sacrifices a whit of clarity or energy. Orange Is the New Black is as fresh and as vital as ever, and you don't always see that in a fourth season."
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Season 4 Review:
"Early episodes of season four are as compelling and entertaining and as well-written and acted as they have been for the past three, which is a tremendous achievement (particularly if it holds--which is likely, but not guaranteed)."
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Season 3 Review:
"It wasn't as immediately satisfying as season two, but it was, in some ways, even more important to the run of the show as a whole, and it built to a final set of episodes that are as good as anything Orange has attempted so far."
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Season 3 Review:
"This season is more concerned with continuing to make its way through the lives of the women who occupy Litchfield Prison, and, with a few misses here and there, is so lived-in in its narrative voice and settled in its “Backstory of the Week” format that you’re quickly at peace and on board with the season’s new direction and slightly more upbeat tone."
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Season 3 Review:
"Jenji Kohan's series about inmates at a women's prison is as addictive as ever. Intermittently hilarious, occasionally infuriating and still very much the drama that new Emmy rules have declared it."
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Season 3 Review:
"This season has done a much better job at focusing on the characters and stories that really pop, and sidelining or writing out the relationships that were boring."
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Season 3 Review:
"While it always bears watching how well Kohan’s shows keep on the rails over the course of their run, season three of Orange kicks off as impressively, confidently and excellently as ever."
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Season 2 Review:
"By the finale, Season 2 is stronger than Season 1, largely because it’s more uncompromising about its characters, at once more nuanced and more damning. "
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Season 2 Review:
"The people of Orange offer some of the best times, and company, to be found on TV."
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Season 2 Review:
"Just as in TV’s first flashback-heavy, multi-character drama “Lost,” it’s the flashbacks that deepen and humanize the characters, and that makes Orange a unique and outstanding series. Piper’s story may draw viewers to the show, but it’s her fellow inmates who make time spent inside this women’s prison worthwhile."
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Season 2 Review:
"Even if not every storyline sings and if Season 2 occasionally lacks the forward momentum that Pipex gave it, I still marvel at the urgency that underpins much of OITNB."
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Season 2 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black is as scatological as ever in the second season and leans awfully heavily on lesbian sex to the point of repetition. But where it shines most is when it shows the sense of dislocation inmates can have from being shuffled around with little explanation. Prisoners come and go, and they all seem to have a story."
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Season 2 Review:
"The memorable characters, playful tone, and subtle examination of culture, gender, and social roles continue to impress, as does the underrated ensemble, led by more confident work from Taylor Schilling than in the first season. If anything feels different, that’s it. There’s a striking sense of confidence across the board."
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Season 2 Review:
"Almost every woman is a good person who made or was forced to make a bad decision, instead of something more sinister, more evil, or even more banal--as if these too were not human characteristics.... But if this sentimental streak is a little soft-headed, it springs from the series’ huge heart and its expansive humanism. "
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Season 2 Review:
"It’s better than the breakout first season, even, finally equalizing the wildly--though thrillingly--undulating tones and sprawling cast of characters into a streamlined and balanced, but just as original and bracing, mode of storytelling that makes the 13 episodes more bingeworthy than ever."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black [is] Netflix’s hilarious, addictive, fantastic new series about the goings-on at a low-security women’s prison."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black is a funny, dramatically sound, poignant, and thoroughly addictive adventure through a bleak looking glass. "
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Season 1 Review:
"Netflix finally achieves its eureka moment with a terrifically entertaining piece of original programming that's truly and bracingly original."
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Season 1 Review:
"Kohen, basing her series on Piper Kerman's memoir, immediately gives us characters worth watching.... Orange is the New Black is TV that'll have you talking for days."
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Season 1 Review:
"It constantly offers more than you expect, and even when it delivers something either predictable or straight from the “women’s prison drama” handbook, it then counters with something fresh or unexpected."
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Season 7 Review:
"Moving, emotional final season that hits mostly high notes, and satisfactorily resolves a whole lot of stories."
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Season 2 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black is a cultural phenomenon and worthy crowd-pleaser--and is the one series everyone should watch this summer."
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Season 1 Review:
"A deft mix of comedy and drama in which the prison feels like a real place and the women are actual people, rather than a thinly veiled excuse to stage catfights, lesbian fantasies and sexual assault."
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Season 7 Review:
"Season seven is the most satisfying it’s been in years because the story gets the chance to lay itself to rest. It’s the same show, but tweaked and trimmed, well-oiled and screwed-down, to a few major relationships in a few essential places. "
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Season 7 Review:
"Ending a long-running series is fraught with obligation — story lines must be wrapped up, questions must be answered, characters must be honored. It’s a daunting task for a show with such a sprawling ensemble — there are 19 stars listed in the opening credits alone — but overall, OITNB delivers."
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Season 5 Review:
"Tough, occasionally oppressive, and--against all odds--still funny when least expected."
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Season 3 Review:
"Orange occasionally seems overpopulated, assuming the audience doesn’t hold all of the characters in equal regard. Orange works better when it’s focused on what unites its inmates, not what divides them."
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Season 3 Review:
"A great ensemble cast and characters who grow in complexity, and humanity, episode by episode. If you didn't know them after the second season, you will get to know them well in the third."
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Season 1 Review:
"Yes, there are a few stereotypes--a guard nicknamed Pornstache is exactly the sleazeball you expect in a women’s prison series. But, for the most part, the show strikes a fresh tone, allowing for real tenderness, social commentary and lots of anxiety in a classic fish-out-of-water scenario."
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Season 1 Review:
"It's very funny and occasionally quite moving, with a crackerjack cast and provocative insights into the way that race and power and magical chickens function in the penal system. "
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Season 1 Review:
"It evokes "Oz" in a very, very good way: it doesn't feel quite like anything that's been put on television (if we're still calling Netflix "television") before."
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Season 7 Review:
"The show mostly resists the temptation to say goodbye with a greatest hits tour, but it certainly gets the band playing some familiar tunes. It will be hard to find any fan with a complaint, given that all the favourites, and some surprises, get at least a little screen time, especially in the final episode. Even the chickens make a comeback. Not all of it works – Daya’s evolution into ice-cold top dog is cartoonish, for example – but it never lacks heart."
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Season 7 Review:
"This sense of coming together perversely helps excuse some of the show’s excess."
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Season 7 Review:
"The show’s humor is key to its appeal, but in the weaker midseason episodes, it can feel like spoonfuls of sugar to make the pedantic bitterness go down. ... And yet for all its faults, it’s difficult to think of another show that stares so unblinkingly at the most egregious excesses of American capitalism and bureaucracy and injustice, and does so while rarely losing sight of the humanity of the people, especially the women, involved. "
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Season 7 Review:
"A conclusion that feels true and honorable, that isn’t necessarily a happy ending but a right one that satisfies. "
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TV Guide Magazine
Season 6 Review:
"Season 6 is a return to near-peak form. [23 Jul - 5 Aug 2018, p.10]"
Season 5 Review:
"The fifth season of the series continues in the pitched, passionate style that's Orange at its juiciest."
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Season 5 Review:
"In its fifth season, the most important takeaway is that Orange Is the New Black” is a show that continues to take gutsy, filthy risks--port-a-potties are a major plot device this season, with all the scatological torture that implies --when it could be resting on its beige-uniformed laurels. It works."
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Season 5 Review:
"Wwhether they say so or not, everyone seems aware that prison sieges don’t end well. That knowledge invests the season with purpose. More than ever, Orange is like a speeding vehicle with a wheel missing: It doesn’t always steer steadily, you can feel the chassis shimmying and straining, but the velocity is urgent."
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Season 4 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black itself, which has grown richer, more surprising, and ambitious in its fourth season. That doesn’t always mean it’s better than ever--often it isn’t--but is just as admirable as ever. "
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Season 4 Review:
"While this fourth chapter in the saga of Litchfield Penitentiary gets off to a bumpier start than usual, it ends on such powerful notes that if you’ve ever been a fan, you simply have to view all 13 episodes. "
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Season 4 Review:
"Season 4 feels more like a drama than ever, and that’s not a bad thing. “Orange Is the New Black” has introduced a multitude of characters we don’t usually see on television and given them complicated and intimate relationships that speak volumes about issues not contained to prison’s impenetrable walls."
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Season 4 Review:
"Time management has never been the show’s strength, and the flashbacks can really put a spotlight on those woes. And yet, spending any small amount of time again with Taystee (Danielle Brooks) who has a new office job with Caputo, or Crazy Eyes (Uzo Aduba) as she wades through the waters of a doomed romance, or Lorna (Yael Stone) engaging her imaginary life with a real-live husband, feels like seeing old friends."
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Season 3 Review:
"Season three makes no significant step forward, but improves by spreading its charm out to the supporting cast."
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Season 3 Review:
"Orange Is the New Black is in a state of wheel-spinning and status quo, with its many characters repeating scenarios that have played out before. And that’s mostly fine since the women of Litchfield (and their guards) have become some of the best characters on TV."
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Season 3 Review:
"It’s a strong start to the season that continues in the second episode that introduces Mary Steenburgen as the mother of Pornstache."
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Season 3 Review:
"In the extended picture, it looks like season three might be playing a bit more with the larger concept of freedom--through the lens, naturally, of those who don’t have it."
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Season 3 Review:
"Its world-building is so strong there’s too much material: the episodes tend to run near a full hour and yet feel jam-packed.... Even if it sometimes builds soapboxes and strawmen (Taryn Manning’s Pennsatucky sometimes exists to be a fake-toothed mouthpiece for Ignorant Conservative America), it remains as fresh and interesting as when it began."
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Season 3 Review:
"There’s inevitably a bit of unevenness to the quality of the stories.... but the series is blessed with a concept, with the right stewardship, that’s built to last."
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Season 1 Review:
"Quibbles aside, watching this superb cast working together remains a pleasure, and it makes Season 2 of Orange Is the New Black an irresistible summer viewing choice. "
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Season 2 Review:
"Consider how well-crafted they are, you might want to pace yourself and savor every precious moment."
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Season 2 Review:
"It's not quite perfection. Nearly everything to do with the character of Piper's fiancé, Larry (Jason Biggs), somewhat based on Kerman's now-husband Larry Bloom, seems problematic to me. Similarly, in emphasizing the humanity of the inmates, their warders have been made to look, for the most part, pathetic, foolish or monstrous. That is remedied in part this season by a deeper look at the staff, even as some of the more difficult prisoners, like Uzo Aduba's Crazy Eyes, are brought into better focus."
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Season 2 Review:
"The problem isn’t the sentiments but the clunky way they’re expressed--as if the writers are reserving the good dialogue for the regulars, along with the empathy.... The missteps are easy to forgive because, in content as well as form, Orange is a modestly revolutionary show."
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Season 2 Review:
"This season also takes a few scenes to get into gear. But it’s faster, and Schilling in particular slides right into her new rhythm as the seasoned prison veteran."
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Season 2 Review:
"All in all the things we love about OITNB are still there--the dark humor, the camaraderie, the misery and the mystery."
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Season 2 Review:
"[The pasts of the ladies at Litchfield] are less “Shawshank Redemption” than “Goodfellas,” with every episode using sparse, smartly edited scenes to tell one inmate’s story."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange has graphic scenes that aren’t for kids. But they aren’t played for cheap gags, either, and that attitude serves the production well. With Schilling in top form, this Orange tastes fresh."
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Season 1 Review:
"The performances by the likes of Mr. Biggs, Ms. Mulgrew and, especially, Ms. Schilling are so convincing, and the dialogue so sharp, that none of this feels like prurience for its own sake."
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Season 1 Review:
"For all its comedy, this is a serious show, one that’s keenly attuned to the damage that women do to other women, and that men and women do to one another, and that the state does to its people before, during and after they go to prison."
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Season 1 Review:
""The Wire's" Snoop would definitely not fit in. But this is the most impressive group of female characters ever assembled in a series, and it's not just window-dressing; each woman has a story and that story will be told."
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange is the New Black proves to be a smart, solid, entertaining effort for the online streaming service."
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Season 1 Review:
"The show becomes more engrossing as is spins out from her story, fleshing out the inmates, their backstories, and their alliances. You may come for the culture-clash cringe-comedy; it’s the real human stories that will have you captivated."
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Season 1 Review:
"Schilling's Piper, engaged to the supportive Larry (Jason Biggs) and dodging the attentions of her former lover (Laura Prepon) as well as more aggressively amorous inmates, displays a nice comic sense as she encounters one prison Catch-22 after another. The supporting cast is a strong one. But it's Kate Mulgrew, as the inmate who rules the prison kitchen with an cast-iron fist, who steals every scene she's in, and should leave Netflix's streaming subscribers begging for more. "
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Season 1 Review:
"Orange is scary, smart and relevant, and it will make you wonder why no one thought to give the “Oz” formula a dose of estrogen before now."
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Season 1 Review:
"Smart, salty, and outrageous, the series falls squarely in the tradition of graphic adult cable drama."
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Seasons & Episodes
- Series Overview
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Season 7
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Season 7 Overview
Air Date: July 26, 2019
- No episode information is currently available for this season
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Season 7 Overview
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Season 6
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Season 6 Overview
Air Date: July 27, 2018
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Season 6 Overview
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Season 5
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Season 5 Overview
Air Date: June 9, 2017
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Season 5 Overview
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Season 4
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Season 4 Overview
Air Date: June 17, 2016
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Season 4 Overview
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Season 3
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Season 3 Overview
Air Date: June 11, 2015
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Season 3 Overview
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Season 2
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Season 2 Overview
Air Date: June 6, 2014
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Season 2 Overview
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Season 1
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Season 1 Overview
Air Date: July 11, 2013
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Season 1 Overview
