Jane the Virgin is the best reason to watch the CW in years.
Photo by Greg Gayne/the CW
When The WB and UPN folded themselves into one network, the CW, in 2006, it was a kind of capitulation, an admission that despite a decade of trying, neither fledgling network had succeeded in becoming a major one. Why did the two mini-networks fail to grow like Fox had a decade prior? It wasn’t because of me. I spent the 11 years of its existence being the WB’s target audience.
WILLA PASKIN
The WB—and, by the end of its run, UPN as well—made soap operas starring attractive actors pretending to be in high school or college, a format before which I was as helpless as a toddler in front of any moving images at all. Buffy,Felicity, Dawson’s Creek, Everwood,Roswell, Veronica Mars: I watched them all, plus the less-memorable Jack And Jill,Popular, and Savannah. If it was a drama on the WB, chances are I loved it. Around the time that the WB became the CW andGossip Girl premiered, I remember wondering if I would ever outgrow these kinds of shows or if I would be powerless before earnestly made series about the love lives of faux-teenagers forever.
Like they almost say, be careful what you wonder about. Because soon thereafter, I got over the CW. Whether it was my age, the quality of the latest faux-teen soaps, or both, the network went from being a regular part of my TV diet to no part at all. I couldn’t stand Smallville or the reboot of Beverly Hills: 90210, both repulsively sincere in their own distinct ways. The Vampire Diaries, the network’s biggest hit, and thenever-ending Supernatural also left me cold. The shows I liked—Life Unexpected,Privileged, The Carrie Diaries, The L.A. Complex—invariably got canceled. By last season, when the network had almost fully transitioned away from shows about unusually angsty young adults to shows about unusually angsty young adults with supernatural powers, I had long since started getting my fix of teenage drama onABC Family.
But just when I was feeling confident I could dismiss the CW entirely, along comes the beguiling Jane the Virgin, which premieres Monday night, and is the best reason to watch the CW in many, many years. Like a sweeter Ugly Betty, Jane the Virgin is a telenovela, but one with a sense of irony and wit, simultaneously winking at and embracing its own format. It is easily the most charming new TV series of the fall, a highly stylized, big-hearted, zippy Technicolor dramedy that is also, uncloyingly, another example of network TV’s growing—at least for the moment—diversity.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2014/10/jane_the_virgin_review_cw_series_is_the_best_reason_to_watch_the_network.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_bot
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