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Los Angeles - Fans of Orange Is the New Black are counting down the hours until the second season of the wildly-popular women's prison "dramedy" is released Friday on streaming video giant Netflix.
The entire 13-episode series will go online nearly a year after the finale of the first season, which won widespread praise for its diverse cast and complex, strong female characters.
In the show based on a 2010 memoir by Piper Kerman lead character Piper (played by Taylor Schilling) is a well-to-do married New Yorker who made a living fashioning organic soaps.
But she was jailed for 15 months for a mistake she made 10 years earlier: she served as a money courier for a sexy female drug dealer named Alex (Laura Prepon), with whom she had a brief affair.
The series recounts Piper's life in prison, and those of the women she encounters while behind bars, including her former lover.
Critics have heaped praise on the series for its realistic, warts-and-all depiction of female characters including blacks, Latinas and Asians not defined by their relationships with men.
This includes transgender Sophia, played by Laverne Cox as the first trans woman of colour to star in a major scripted series which earned her the cover of Time magazine last month.
"We see different sides of Sophia that we didn't see in season one," Cox said recently in a preview of season two. "She's more carefree," she told People magazine.
The first episode Looks Blue, Tastes Red is directed by Silence of the Lambs actress Jodie Foster, who also helmed one of last season's episodes and who married her girlfriend in April this year.
Die-hard fans will no doubt immediately binge-watch the whole season, as has become the norm since the advent of shows being released as a whole season at once online.
Orange Is the New Black is widely tipped for awards glory at the Emmys in August, following the success of fellow Netflix drama "House of Cards," the first online-only show to be nominated for a major Emmy last year.
Watch the trailer here:
