“Duh, it’s not just the skinny white girl who’s interesting.”

There is something occasionally corny about the first six episodes of the new season, and not just the one that has all the inmates provide their own definitions of “love.”OINTB’s generous ethos means its characters possess all imaginable qualities, except any that are truly dull or reprehensible. There is a kind of sameness, not in the characterizations, but in the demands on our sympathy, which are near total. (Even Pennsatucky and Daya’s horrible mother Aleida get kind of cute this season.) The show always makes the mitigating case for the characters’ past mistakes. 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.

Slate’s Willa Paskin has good things to say about Season 2 of Orange Is the New Black, which will be dumped, in bulk, onto the Netflix servers tomorrow. The trailer, if you haven’t already caught it, is here; I’d also like to pitch this Paskin line as the new tagline for the show: Duh, it’s not just the skinny white girl who’s interesting. [Slate]