Jane the Virgin felt so real precisely because it was a fantasy

Vulture

"In a counterintuitive way, the heightened premise of a telenovela feels more accurate than reality," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "A story about a young woman who’s been accidentally artificially inseminated, who’s presented with a baby out of absolutely nowhere, feels more true to life than a typical narrative about conception and birth." VanArendonk adds: "In thinking about Jane the Virgin for these past five years, I’ve also gotten stuck on how the show’s deep investment in human emotion grounded its many flights of telenovela fancy. Thinking about it that way, all of the realistic stuff — friendship, minor family disagreements, parenthood, money — makes up the core of the show. The telenovela stuff — the drug lords, the stalkers, the secret twins, and the show’s hyper-self-aware presentation of itself as a story — all that is decoration, an ornate and silly layer of shine and flash that ultimately helps dress up a story about typical, day-to-day life. In that light, the telenovela melodrama is just a delivery device, a sleek roller coaster that zips around and does loop the loops, while underneath, Jane can be a show about real things."

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