The XX_Files

IN 2016, I INTERVIEWED the showrunner of Jane the Virgin, Jennie Snyder Urman. She was smart and candid, and we had a good conversation about Jane, one of the most inventive, emotionally layered shows on television. But in my write-up, I said that Jane, which is about a 23-year-old Catholic virgin who is accidentally inseminated at a gynecological appointment, has a “silly premise.” I wrote that I’d called Snyder Urman up for a “little chat.” Even in the course of making the case for Jane’s seriousness of purpose, my language was trivializing, infantilizing. Would I have said that Mad Men has a silly premise? Would I have had a “little chat” with David Chase or Vince Gilligan?

is the sort of television that often gets called a “guilty pleasure,” code for “women watch this.” Jane lives with her religious grandmother and freewheeling mother; the three of them share a’s genius is that for all the clever involutions and sweeping plots, it never loses touch with its essential humanity.