Jennifer and I were late to the party with Jane the Virgin, which aired from 2014 to 2019. We just started watching it on Netflix and are four episodes in. The series won a raft of awards, but we never got around to checking it out until our friend Lee put us onto it a couple of weeks ago.
The series is both a telenovela and a parody of a telenovela, as it plays with and exaggerates various tropes of the genre. It tells the story of Jane, played by Gina Rodriguez, a young cocktail waitress and aspiring writer in Miami who has vowed to save her virginity for marriage but becomes pregnant when her gynecologist accidently inseminates her. One of the devices of Latin telenovelas that the series exaggerates is an endless cascade of coincidences: the sperm with which Jane is impregnated is that of the gynecologist’s brother who is also Jane’s boss, whose step-mother is the gynecologist’s former lesbian lover and whose wife is being investigated by a police detective who happens to be Jane’s fiancé. You get the idea. It would all be hard to keep straight were it not for an off-screen narrator who breaks in to explain things in a deliciously round Spanish accent. He is the second-best thing about the show after Gina Rodriguez herself, who is completely endearing.
If you take the show too seriously, you can end up rolling your eyes and muttering about how ridiculously unlikely it all is. But if you embrace it as a comedy of errors, a kind of Marx Brothers meets Peyton Place, it’s a lot of fun. There’s no telling whether we’ll stick with it for the remaining 96 episodes, but so far so good.