The new season of “Orange” is both more nuanced and more damning of its characters. Illustration by Peter Strain

Last year, when the women’s-prison series “Orange Is the New Black” débuted, on Netflix, it felt like a blast of raw oxygen. Part of this was baldly algorithmic: here, at last, were all those missing brown faces, black faces, wrinkled faces, butch lesbians, a transgender character played by a transgender actor—an ensemble of electrifying strangers, all of them so good that it seemed as if some hidden valve had been tapped, releasing fresh stories and new talent. As bouncy as vaudeville, “Orange” veered away from the antihero solemnity of many cable shows, but it shared those series’ air of authority and, especially, their willingness to be rude.

The apparent protagonist of Season 1 was the Waspy Piper Chapman, based on Piper Kerman, whose memoir of serving time for drug trafficking provided the show’s outline. But, as the showrunner Jenji Kohan has acknowledged, the Brooklyn yuppie was more Trojan horse than heroine; with each episode, the show’s focus swung wider and wilder. New women stepped into the spotlight, none a token or a best friend; each got a flashback, explaining how she landed in prison. These backstories explored poverty and addiction, yet the show had zero interest in PBS gloom, working a funky, irreverent tone, mixing warm and nasty, subtle and cartoonish. Standout characters included the tough Russian cook Red, the meth-mouthed Pennsatucky, and Sophia, a transgender hair stylist. There was a tragic death, a colorful villain—the abusive guard Pornstache—and two romances: Piper’s, with her ex-girlfriend Alex, and the inmate Daya’s, with the nice-guy guard Bennett. If the show had a mission statement, it was to restore the humanity of women so often portrayed as monsters or as lurid victims. But the story’s mischievous streak and its cheerful prurience kept the corn quotient low: a few gooey moments felt forgivable, given the over-all daring.

Still, after the second season became available for streaming, I got nervous: the first episode took a radical structural risk, throwing Piper into a new, more frightening prison, in Chicago, so that she could testify at the trial of the drug lord she had worked for. It was an impressive gambit, but it didn’t quite land, in part because of a rare klutzy flashback, a just-so story about the family roots of Piper’s dishonesty. (“I learned it by watching you!”) In Episode 2, though, we’re back in upstate New York, and back in gear; as one does with Netflix, I scarfed the rest of the season down as if it were a sleeve of Thin Mints. No regrets. 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. Even the guards get full context, from Fig, the prison’s stiletto-heeled female assistant warden, to Caputo, its sad-sack administrator and the bass player in a band called Sideboob. Among the funniest, saddest figures is Healy, the bigoted prison social worker, who totes around Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men,” struggles to connect with his Ukrainian mail-order bride, and opens up a ridiculously unsafe “safe space” for the inmates, as a way of easing his own isolation.

Last season, “Orange” hedged its bets a bit, making the majority of the inmates, while not blameless, victims of a lousy environment, an impulse that skirted condescension. This year, the flashbacks cut deeper, exposing a few of the women as crazy or selfish, as varied as human beings everywhere. The cancer patient Rosa was a joy-riding bank robber; the activist nun Sister Ingalls an egotistical celebrity. In the brilliant episode “A Whole Other Hole,” the series even turns its sweetest character, Morello, into its most chilling figure; yet as the details of her stalker history unfold we maintain sympathy—this is the show at its most ingenious, mingling compassion with clarity about the world’s terrors.

Season 2 is also more efficient about its storytelling: small details planted early on—the head cook Gloria’s ability to curse her enemies with candles, for instance—pay off wittily, and there’s a fable-like wholeness that the first season lacked. (The final scene, which I won’t spoil, has a visual and musical collision of pure karmic satisfaction.) There’s also a fantastic new devil in the mix: Vee, a predatory dealer who, on the “outside,” was the mother figure to the foster child Taystee. An old-school criminal, Vee (Lorraine Toussaint) manipulates the younger black women by using a powerful tool: their legitimate desire for solidarity within a racist system. Some become her puppets, others mercenaries, and one of them—Poussey, played by the radiant Samira Wiley—becomes a heroic resister, driven by her love for Taystee. Like the best elements of the show, it’s a dynamic morality tale, with sharp insights into the ways in which what seem to be individual moral choices are embedded within relationships, and how easy it is to exploit anyone by tapping her need for acceptance.

Frustratingly, in the Emmy ballots “Orange Is the New Black” has been slotted as a comedy—although, to be fair, it does deliver more zingers than your average prison show. When a womanizing ex-junkie, played by the pop-eyed delight Natasha Lyonne, is unable to seduce a female guard, she moans, “I’m like Icarus, whose wings melted before he could fuck the sun.” The backstory of Black Cindy, a former airport security guard, features a montage of such gleeful criminality—iPads snatched from bags, hot men illegally frisked—that I fell off my sofa laughing. Even minor characters get good lines, such as when Daya’s creep of a mother, Aleida, reassures her daughter, “A lot of people are stupid and still live full, productive lives.” When the show hits weak spots—everything that deals with Piper’s nebbishy fiancé, as well as some repetition in a pregnancy story—they’re easy to ignore, given the lively, distracting snarl of plots and subplots.

It’s only once you’ve watched the entire season that the invisible ink glimmers through, revealing policy arguments that in other contexts would be hand-wringing op-eds: a “job fair” that’s a bait and switch to shame desperate inmates; showers that fill up with excrement while no repairs are done, because the assistant warden is siphoning funds; an Orwellian policy of “compassionate release,” which entails dumping an elderly inmate with dementia onto the city streets. We live in an era stocked with grim adult dramas whose themes boil down, in the end, to abstractions about good and evil, darkness and light. For all its daffy, dirty ways, “Orange Is the New Black” is more strongly rooted in the real world. Like “The Wire,” it intends to illuminate injustice by using stories so bright that you can’t ignore them.

You knew it was coming, and, finally, it has arrived: the Louis C.K. backlash. Fortuna’s wheel and all that jazz. By the time Season 4 ended, online critics had begun grumbling that the show was less than funny, too preachy, and downright weird about women. While not every complaint hit its mark, the carping came as a relief: the non-stop raves, my own included, had begun to feel like strangulation.

It’s not that the season was bad—it was daring and often beautiful, emphasizing serial storytelling over episodic one-offs, with many indelible moments, especially those involving Louie’s daughters. But the rising debate struck me as useful, a model for how crucial it is to extract the medium from the bear trap of Golden Age rhetoric, in which respect for an auteur equates with worship, and TV becomes church, with everyone shushing the non-believers. “Louie” is a solipsistic project by design: it’s a one-man show about an isolate. But TV is a conversation. And this season, in particular, seemed to speak to the outside world, echoing modern debates about rape jokes, with a finale that felt like a choral response to the similarly controversial “Girls.” It dared us to talk back.