Jane the Virgin: never has a TV show been so wonderfully bonkers and yet so genuinely moving

Based on a Venezuelan telenovela, this soap opera-style romcom anchors its zaniness in deep character authenticity while laughing with its genre, never at it

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It’s impossible not to fall for Jane the Virgin, a romantic comedy series with the convoluted plot and larger-than-life characters of a soap opera. Or, to be more precise, a Latin American telenovela. In fact, the show, set in Miami and revolving around a bilingual household of three generations of women, is a telenovela (loosely based on the Venezuelan Juana La Virgen), doubling as a loving satire.

The opening scenes of the show set up the zaniness to come when the titular Jane (a brilliant, multilayered, breakout star performance by Gina Rodriguez) – who has been dutifully saving herself for marriage – is accidentally artificially inseminated at a routine gynaecology appointment. The owner of the rogue sperm? Not her handsome police officer boyfriend and soon-to-be fiance Michael (Brett Dier) but rather the dishy, impossibly tight-shirted owner of the hotel where she she works, Rafael (Justin Baldoni), with whom Jane just happened to have locked lips five years earlier.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3AOpwhF
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