Is it a problem that “Orange Is the New Black” essentially treats prison like a bad day in high school, the kind that includes both a scary walk to the principal’s office and an embarrassing visit to the nurse?

To put it another way, is Jenji Kohan, creator, executive producer and sometime writer of this Netflix series, which returned for a second season on Friday, trying to have it both ways: milking the women’s-penitentiary setting for pathos and the occasional flash of violence and then consistently defaulting to light satire and bad-hygiene jokes when things threaten to get too real?

Well, of course she is, and she’s awfully good at it, which explains why the show has been such a resounding success with critics and, it appears, audiences. Come for the comedy, and you can also fall for the sentimental back stories and the sheen of relevance provided by the large ensemble of working-class, minority, lesbian and transgender characters. In exchange, the show promises to remain at the level of magic-realist cable dramedy — no real emotions allowed for more than a few seconds.

That’s not a complaint or (solely) a condescending dismissal. It’s a description and perhaps a rueful suggestion of what the show could be if it weren’t as firmly dedicated to being smart entertainment. But there’s a lot to be said for smart entertainment. I suspect I’m not the only viewer who looks back with nostalgia, after less than a decade, to the macabre whimsy of HBO’s “Six Feet Under” (or, more recently, Showtime’s “Dexter”) and wonders when cable drama got so grim. “Orange Is the New Black” reminds me in spirit of “Six Feet Under,” except that it’s better and funnier.

The first episode of the new season (six of 13 were made available to critics) takes the incarcerated heroine, Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling), out of the upstate New York prison where the show is set and sends her cross-country. Freed from the usual requirement to track multiple story lines, Kohan; her co-writer, Tara Herrmann; and the director Jodie Foster (yes, that Jodie Foster) turn out one of the series’ best chapters.

The focus is almost entirely on Chapman. An authentically spooky opening sequence follows her as she’s hauled from her bunk with no explanation and put on a plane, and we see that she believes she killed a fellow inmate, Pennsatucky, whom she was beating at the end of Season 1.

The episode is a reminder that the heart of “Orange Is the New Black,” whether viewers care about it or not, is the moral education of Chapman, her Piper’s Progress through a world in which her self-righteousness, hypocrisy and narcissism are constantly challenged. And while Schilling’s range is narrow, she’s well cast here.

It’s worth noting that some of the best, most natural writing in the show is done for the small group of male characters, including the corrections officer played by Michael Harney and the handyman played by Matt Peters.

By the second episode, however, we’re back at the fictional Litchfield prison and embroiled in the soap-opera dramatics of the inmates’ lives: Dayanara (Dascha Polanco), pregnant and dangerously constipated; Red (Kate Mulgrew), sadly banished from her fief in the kitchen; the transgender Sophia (Laverne Cox), serving as a negative example of how to dress for an interview at the prison job fair.

Kohan and her writers, abetted by their excellent cast, know how to leave us laughing. They do it when Chapman learns the crime committed by the male inmate she’s cut a deal with, and Schilling looks as if she’s won the office football pool when she says: “He’s a hit man? Oh, I thought he was a rapist. I’m so relieved.”

They do it again when the randy lesbian played by Lea DeLaria cuts off her own story about a dog licking something from her hand, curtly saying, “It got weird.” As long it keeps getting weird, “Orange Is the New Black” will bear watching.