How To Enjoy Jane the Virgin Without Watching All 100 Hours of It

Jane the Virgin
Watch Seasons 1-4 on Netflix
Series Finale airs July 31 on The CW

One of the phenomena of the Peak TV era is the show that keeps getting better even as its audience keeps getting smaller. There may be no better example in the last half decade than Jane the Virgin.

From its origins as an American adaptation of Juana la Virgen, the Spanish-language serial that aired on Venezuela’s RCTV in 2002, Jane the Virgin spent much of its critically-acclaimed run alternating between embracing the telenovela — the world’s most popular TV genre — and self-consciously spoofing it. This has led some to assert that the show is primarily a spoof. Not true! This is a spoof of the telenovela:

Like Ugly Betty, the first Americanized and Anglicized telenovela to sustain an audience, the creative team behind Jane have pushed far beyond the original show’s concept. Unlike “Ugly Betty,” Jane has an ingenuity and drive that just won’t quit.

Every week the show’s handful of core characters move around a small checkerboard of sets while paying continuous homage to the genre: eavesdropping here, changing partners there. Yet after watching more than 20 episodes over four seasons, I continue to find it both funny and fresh.

Unfortunately, the show’s “live” audience — the viewers who pay the bills by watching Jane and commercial breaks in real time — has dwindled to the point where it is unsustainable, even by the paltry standards of the CW. Despite a big midseason hosanna from The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum last spring, one-quarter of Jane’s season three audience simply vanished. Of the 1.2 million viewers for the season four finale, more than half DVR’d it. As it bravely marched to its series finale, its 100th episode, the audience just kept slipping away.

It’s highly likely that at least some of Nussbaum’s readers didn’t even bother checking to see where CW was on their cable (or adjust their TV antennas to find the signal), but went straight to Netflix looking for it. Not long ago Jane was the most-watched Netflix show in Texas and California, though you could infer that the show is mainly appreciated by Latinx viewers who grew up on telenovelas. If so, that’s a cultural pigeonholing this show doesn’t deserve.

Just as American viewers did not need prior knowledge of British single-camera comedy to watch the remake of The Office or of reality TV to understand Big Brother (actually, I still don’t understand Big Brother), genre knowledge is not a prerequisite for enjoying Jane.

Oh, but then you go to the Jane episode list and see 81 hours on Netflix. It’s daunting to think about jumping into a show with so much backstory. But if you can accept a major spoiler or two, I’ll give you a shortcut. Here it comes, right after the photo.

So I recommend dropping the needle at episode 15 of season 3 (aka “Chapter Fifty-Nine”). By this point Jane has gone through a big reset and, I think you’ll agree, is hitting its stride.The setup: Jane Villanueva (Gina Rodriguez) is an ambitious young woman who’s been “saving herself” for marriage, which might seem a stretch for a pretty 23-year-old woman living in Miami except that Jane gets constant reinforcement from her two housemates: mother Xiomara (Andrea Navedo), who had Jane when she was sixteen, and Xo’s pious mother Alba (Ivonne Coll).

Their plan for Jane is seemingly derailed, however, when an ob-gyn accidentally inseminates her at the clinic. At about the same time, Xo spots the father of her child on TV — Rogelio de la Vega (Jaime Camil), who has become a popular telenovela star. With the birth of baby Mateo and Rogelio suddenly back in their lives, the Villanueva family expands by not one but two.

Mateo’s father is soon revealed to be Rafael (Justin Baldoni), owner of a popular Miami hotel, who had frozen his seed prior to cancer treatment so that he and his wife Petra (Yael Grobglas), could have a child someday. Petra rashly steals the sperm one day and books an appointment with the ob-gyn, Luisa (Yara Martinez) … who happens to be Rafael’s sister in addition to a hot mess.

That, and the fact that it’s four years later, are all you really need to know to jump in at my recommended starting point.

Jane the Virgin was created by Jennie Snyder Urman, a New Yorker who worked on Gilmore Girls and the 90210 reboot, so the show is all-American, with influences reaching back to Ally McBeal and Sex and the City (which was parodied in an episode). The relationship between Jane and Xo is pure Gilmores.

But the secret sauce of Jane, as well as its saving grace, is a character unlike any I’ve seen (or heard) before: the narrator. Voiced by Anthony Mendez, the “Latin Lover Narrator,” as the closed captioning calls him, is an all-seeing, mostly all-knowing plot expositor and peanut gallery rolled into one. Maybe it's the fact that we don’t see him, but Mendez manages to dominate the show without hijacking it.

Mo Ryan once described him this way: “The Narrator is not just a conveyer of information, he’s a personality in his own right; a witty pal who roots for the characters even as he wryly describes their missteps, confusion and conflicts. … Jane has managed to turn one of the ‘eat your vegetables’ aspects of television storytelling into a candy-coated treat.”

Another way Jane stands out among American TV shows is below the line. It has placed more women of color in the director’s chair than whole networks do. If telenovelas really are a form of global soft power, then Jane the Virgin is an expression of American values that Netflix ought to be exporting around the world.

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Aaron Barnhart has written about television since 1994, including 15 years as TV critic for the Kansas City Star.