If you’re looking for a new television obsession, look no further than Jane the Virgin. Now that the fifth and final season has dropped on Netflix, it’s eminently bingeable, with 100 episodes to feast on. Jane is fantastical but topical, innovative but unpretentious, effervescent but unafraid of digging deep into the messy emotional work of how we live now. In an age when prestige TV too often means moody, navel-gazing drama, Jane proves that excellent television needn’t be dark, self-serious, or humorless. In fact, it can be an explosion of whimsy, pure delight, and kisses that literally lift your feet off the ground. Jane herself describes the story best: “a big, multigenerational story with romance, and drama, and heartache, and crime, even—all of the lightness and all of the darkness.”
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Here’s the premise: 23-year-old Jane Villaneuva is a teacher and aspiring writer waitressing at a hotel restaurant to make ends meet, but her hyper-planned life is thrown off track when her gynecologist accidentally inseminates her at a routine check-up. To complicate matters, Jane becomes pregnant without ever experiencing sex, as she’s saving herself for marriage to her police officer fiance—and the sperm donor is her married boss, with whom she once shared a torrid, fleeting kiss. To use the show’s catchphrase, “Straight out of a telenovela, right?”
Based on a Venezuelan telenovela, Jane is a love letter to the form. It asks a compelling question: how would a real person process a telenovela twist? How would you feel if your husband came back from the dead? What if your baby daddy’s international crime lord stepmother kidnapped your hours-old son from the hospital, then ransomed him? What if your evil twin poisoned you to the point of mute paralysis, then stole your identity? Jane tells telenovela stories on a human scale, yet it never lambasts telenovelas—rather, it uses the form to explore emotional depths that real life can’t plumb. Sure, a crime lord kidnapping your newborn son is outlandish, but how deeply would that traumatize you? How would it shape you as a first-time parent? For how many years would you live with the fear that your son might be kidnapped again? Jane considers all of these questions and more. What other show could bring the protagonist’s husband back from the dead and then saddle her with allegations of life insurance fraud?
Through a sultry hype-man narrator credited only as Latin Lover Narrator, the show celebrates women’s stories, adopting tropes from sources too often bastardized as “chick lit,” like romance novels and soap operas. Jane is a show deeply interested in how we tell stories, and through its goofy, telenovela-superfan narrator, it revels in its self-referential flourishes. It embraces magical realism to underscore the hugeness of life’s highs, as when the pages of Jane’s novel swirl around her head during a creative breakthrough, or when the windows of her kitchen blow open to admit a shower of white petals when she and Rafael rekindle their romance with a glorious, sweeping kiss. Jane knows well that sometimes, life feels exactly that big.
Without the revelation of Gina Rodriguez’s sensational performance as Jane, the show would stall out. Rodriguez’s Jane is a fiercely lovable heroine who’s all the more endearing for her imperfection—she’s generous yet judgmental, goal-oriented yet often rigid. She meets her match in Michael Cordero, the silly, steadfast police officer she eventually marries, and in Rafael Solano, the troubled playboy with a heart of gold who becomes her biggest cheerleader. Her family life is anchored by Xiomara, her wild child mother with big dreams, and Alba, her strict, loving Catholic grandmother. There’s no one on television quite like Rogelio De La Vega, telenovela superstar and Jane’s long-lost father, whose outlandish vanity and surprising tenderness make for a dynamite package wrapped in lavender dress shirts. These characters are dynamic, lived in, exquisitely written; their pasts inform their present, and their traumas animate their choices for years to come.
Few characters on television have enjoyed such rewarding, transformational arcs as Petra Solano, who begins the series as Rafael’s haughty, conniving wife, an obvious foil to Jane, only to end the series as Jane’s dearest friend. Petra and Jane become family against their will, but soul sisters by choice. Yet even as Petra grows more vulnerable through her trials at the hands of her evil twin sister and her manipulative mother, the show never gives her a personality transplant. In fact, it celebrates Petra in all her complexity, showing her to be at once high-handed yet giving, unsentimental yet fiercely protective. Consider, for example, a beat when she exasperatedly comments, “Sometimes I forget to think about other people, but I’m working on it, okay?” Indeed Petra can be self-centered, yet we love her for it, knowing full well that it’s a self-defense mechanism from a scrappy Czech childhood spent busking to support herself, and that the pendulum will swing back in another episode.
What Jane brings to the television landscape can’t be understated—in fact, it’s a pastel-colored revolution. In the Villanuevas, we have a multigenerational Latinx family, one whose matrilineal stories of faith, family, and striving for a better life honor the immigrant experience. Told bilingually, the show both celebrates and deconstructs the importance of cultural tradition, while highlighting timely themes like racism, class divisions, and the struggle of life as an undocumented immigrant.
Kevin Estrada
Jane is the daughter of a teenage mother, who herself is the daughter of devout Catholic. In that dynamic lie tense foundational stories about sexuality, virginity, and gender roles. Through these three women, Jane brings heart and humor to knotty truths about how women of different generations relate to one another, like when Jane takes her scandalized grandmother shopping for a vibrator, or when she butts heads with Alba’s husband over his refusal to help with housework. When Petra inseminates herself with Rafael’s sperm to conceive twin girls in a textbook telenovela twist, her daughters become half-siblings to Jane’s son Mateo, creating a sprawling, blended family—one where Petra can improbably turn to Alba for advice, and where family brunches are a weekly affair. In a time when our definition of the nuclear family is evolving, Jane’s depiction of a big, messy, loving family is refreshing and real.
In one of the show’s finest, most emblematic emotional beats, Jane turns to improv classes at Rogelio’s suggestion in order to get out of a creative rut caused by a negative review of her novel. She struggles to abide by the “yes, and” commandment of improv, mired as she is in her own overthinking. Meanwhile, as her romance with Rafael grows more serious, she fears that her marriage to Michael (who is then presumed dead) will be diminished or invalidated—that he’ll forever seem merely a speedbump along the path of destiny to Rafael, her One True Love. When she confides her fears in Rafael, he tells Jane that their love is a “yes, and.” Rafael isn’t Jane’s destiny or endpoint, and a new love story with him doesn’t erase Jane’s love story with Michael—it simply means more love.
Herein lies the show’s thesis: the best things in life are abundant, not scarce. Romance, family, friendship, fulfillment--so long as you strive to do good, goodness will find you, even when life seems made more of valleys than it does peaks. Tragedy doesn’t define you, even when cancer, kidnappings, and deportation loom large. Over five seasons, these characters grow and change by leaps and bounds, and even as they’re put through hell, we see them take rewarding risks, fall in love, and achieve their dreams. We root for them, grieve for them, and most of all, we feel like they’re family.
If you’re in the market for a show that’s smart, infectiously warm, and just plain fun, Jane is that show. Just make sure you bring tissues, because you’ll be crying happy tears.
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