[Televisionary]

After a sterling first season, expectations were high for the sophomore season of Jenji Kohan’s female prison drama. Fortunately, Season 2 proved to be just as juicy, sweet, and tart as you’d want it to be. (MAJOR SPOILERS ahead.) At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The Whole Of Orange Is the New Black Season 2 Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Parts," in which I review the entirety of the incredible second season of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black . Orange Is the New Black ’s stunning second season manages to be ambitiously large and somehow intimate. It’s the equivalent of a pointillist painting: from up close each dash and dot has its own individual identity and meaning, but when viewed at a distance, they coalesce into something altogether different and dependent on its parts. In its deeply complex and magnificent sophomore year, Jenji Kohan’s Orange Is the New Black offers a scathing indictment of a broken system, using Litchfield Penitentiary as a ...

The second season of the Netflix prison drama is a gripping, beautiful, majestic thing. Warning: Spoilers for Season 2 ahead! At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, " Orange Is the New Black Continues The Dickensian Tradition Of The Wire ," in which I review Season 2 of Netflix's Orange Is the New Black , which returns June 6 on the streaming platform. There are the television shows that you love to watch but that drift from powerful and provocative to comforting background noise, and then there are those that arrive with the momentous force of a revolution, issuing a clarion cry that is impossible to resist. Women’s prison drama Orange Is the New Black , which returns for its second season on June 6, is most definitely the latter, a groundbreaking and deeply layered series that explores crime and punishment, poor circumstance, and bad luck. (At its heart, it is about both the choices we make and those that are made for us.) It constructs a gripping narrativ...

Yes, returning shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Good Wife, Borgen, Parenthood , and others were aces this year. But this is all about the newcomers. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "The 16 Best New Television Shows Of 2013," in which I offer up my picks for the best new shows of the year, including Rectify, Orange Is the New Black, The Returned, Masters of Sex, Broadchurch , and Orphan Black , to name a few. 16. Bates Motel (A&E) The story of Norman Bates — recounted in Alfred Hitchcock’s jangling Psycho — is only too familiar to most people. But under the watchful eye of executive producers Kerry Ehrin and Carlton Cuse, the Twin Peaks-esque Bates Motel offers a fresh look at Norman’s formative years (despite the fact that the series is set in the present day and in a different location), including his relationship with his overbearing, quixotic mother, Norma (a stellar Vera Farmiga) after they purchase a run-down motel on the Oregon coastline an...

From Breaking Bad ’s stevia packet to Girls ’ Q-tip, here are some of the pivotal objects that sum up scripted television in 2013. SPOILER ALERT for a ton of shows if you’re not caught up. You’ve been warned. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "12 Objects That Defined The Year In Television," in which I look at the 12 objects that roughly define 2013 in scripted television, from a Q-tip on Girls and a Sharpie on Homeland to an automobile on Downton Abbey and that Cytron card on Scandal . 1. This Q-tip. Where It Appeared: Girls What It Was: A seemingly innocuous Q-Tip, used repeatedly by Hannah (Lena Dunham), whose OCD was quickly spiraling out of control, to clean out her ears. But she inserted it too deeply into her inner ear canal. What It Did: It punctured her eardrum (“I heard hissing,” she later said), leading Hannah to seek medical attention at the hospital. What It Meant: That Hannah had truly hit rock bottom with her psychological condition...

Netflix’s latest is one of the year’s best offerings on any platform. Why Jenji Kohan’s gripping prison drama makes for essential, addictive viewing. At BuzzFeed, you can read my latest feature, "Why You Need To Stop What You’re Doing And Watch Orange Is The New Black ," in which I review Netflix's latest original series, one of the year's finest television offerings. The year’s best television series have so far emerged from some very unlikely places, whether it’s the searing Sundance Channel drama Rectify , BBC America’s upcoming gut-wrenching murder mystery Broadchurch , or Netflix’s superlative prison drama Orange Is the New Black , from Weeds creator, Jenji Kohan. (That two of these shows deal with issues of crime and punishment — and specifically imprisonment — is not surprising, given our societal preoccupations at the moment, though these weighty issues are handled extremely differently within Rectify and Orange .) Orange Is the New Black , released b...