Jane the Virgin departs with the ending creator Jennie Snyder Urman originally pitched to The CW

Entertainment Weekly

“I remember telling them the story of it,” creator and showrunner Urman says of the original pitch meeting with CW executives. “I don’t think I had a narrator at that point but the story was very similar. I told them the ending lines in the pitch for the show.” Urman adds: "It’s all baked into the idea of a telenovela and what a telenovela is and how they always have endings. They’re different from American soap operas where they’re built to keep churning out story and to go on as long as the viewers will have them. Telenovelas are built with endings in mind and I felt like it was very important for me to embrace that structure when I took on Jane and to be true to the format of what a telenovela is at its core, and that’s a story with an ending. So when I thought about Jane, I thought about how it would end and I wanted it all to be adding up to something that would feel like a whole, complete journey that has an inevitability to it. And so that was so important in thinking about the project and thinking about the telenovela roots of it, so I did pitch them the ending at the beginning.”

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• Jennie Snyder Urman didn't want a "holy sh*t" ending: "We really wanted it to be about having an ending and having it be warm and looking at the ways that we say goodbye while keeping our connections; that was really the focus of it," she says. "The audience has gone with us and has had so many big twists and turns along the way and every year we leave off on cliffhangers. I think part of the pact you make with the audience is that you know where you're going and that by the end you'll reach a resolution, and that was important to me — that we weren't leaving with a holy sh*t feeling, we were leaving with more of 'the end' feeling."
• Urman was "pretty bummed" when TMZ posted spoilery photos of the series finale
• Urman on her series finale cameo: "I fought myself to not cut it out"
• Jane the Virgin finally revealed the narrator's identity
• Jane's series finale played with self-referentiality both big and small, with the biggest saved for the final moment
• It was a fitting sendoff filled with unabashed emotion and romance that neatly tied up the loose ends with a big bright bow
• The only significant difference between the pilot and the finale is that no one is a villain anymore, and everyone is important
• The best part of the series finale was the use of silence as a valuable emotional tool that allowed viewers to fill in the blanks
• An appreciation of Yael Grobglas' Petra, Jane the Virgin's most complicated character