Orange Is the New Black Season 3: Look for more comedic touches, new characters

Let the binging begin on Netflix. Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is now streaming earlier than expected, with expectations that some of the storylines will lighten up.

Originally scheduled to launch Friday at midnight, the latest release was made available hours sooner.

The prison series that has been in both drama and comedy categories when it comes to award season nominations, now promises to be more funny than serious, after a dark Season 2.

"And we're going to bring in new characters, and they always spice up the prison somehow," said cast member Selenis Leyva, appearing at a red carpet event in New York on Thursday. 

"There's a sexy, ridiculously amazing-looking character that comes in this season and she's going to give a little sexiness to us all," said Leyva. "But there are a lot of wonderful actresses and actors joining us, and also the crew that we already love."

The character likely to be setting hearts beating faster at Litchfield Penitentiary will no doubt be inmate Stella Carlin, played by Australian Ruby Rose, who was also at the fan event.

But Leyva, who plays head cook Gloria Mendoza, said it won't all be about sexuality. The show will also deal with matters of faith and motherhood as it did in the first two seasons, she said.

As for the main character, the wiser version of Piper Chapman that emerged in Season 2 will continue to evolve.

Starring Taylor Schilling as Chapman, the series profiles the prison life of a middle-class 20-something woman serving time for transporting drug money. 

"I think Piper's started to strip down old ideas that didn't hold right in prison," Schilling said. "So now she's having to stand in a lot of letting go, and in being herself. She's had to find some new confidence."

It was in 2010 that the plan for the TV series first took off, when Piper Kerman met television producer Jenji Kohan on Kerman's book tour in Los Angeles.

"And things moved pretty quickly then," Kerman told CBC's Wendy Mesley.

Real Piper spared violence in jail, was celibate

Like Piper in the TV series, she said the experience of incarceration changed her a great deal. "It's hard to know what I would be like if I had made different choices 20 years ago," Kerman said. "That's the truth."

She says she saw plenty of conflict in jail, but none of the violence of the TV series. 

She was celibate in jail, she says, but like in the series, there was a lot of sexual activity going on.

"I think that women's sexuality is important and absolutely worthy of depiction and inquiry,' she says. "So I think that's one of the greatest things about the show."

Kerman has gone on to be an advocate for prisoners, and she's concerned about the growing numbers of those incarcerated in the U.S. for minor crimes, especially women, as well as the detrimental effects of solitary confinement.

"What that isolation really does is, if you do have any mental health problems, even if they aren't really pressing and difficult when you get locked up, they exacerbate them and make them much, much worse," Kerman says.

"I admire Piper Kerman tremendously," said cast member Laverne Cox at the series party in New York.

"I love her so much, and I Iove that she wrote a brilliant book. She's a brilliant consultant on our show," said Cox, who said her own role has shown that it's possible to be a black transgender woman and to have a role on a popular television show.

Cox praised Kerman as being "smart and understanding of the privilege that she has."

"That's so important for people who do have privileges," she said. "I think it's really important for us to interrogate our privilege and to be able to be critical of it so that we can acknowledge people who may not be so privileged, and I think she has been a beautiful advocate for prison reform."