My Jane Addiction

It's been a repeated urge these past two years, a desire for escape, a search for connection--escape from pandemic disease and ugly politics and (now) war, connection with stories, with characters, especially characters different from the ones I live with and see every day. The search takes place in the pages of books, yes, but more so on the screen, because inherent in the need to escape and to connect is a need to shut down--the muscles required to sit semi-vertical, turn pages, and run the eye across lines of text, the synapses that must fire to find meaning in symbols, to turn words into mental pictures.

There was a time when my TV watching was limited to Sunday night Masterpiece on PBS, but that was a person with much more energy than I, one who had little kids to occupy her evening hours and who filled spare moments with writing and making. I miss her, a little bit, but she also makes me tired. For a while during the early months of the pandemic, watching shows was a way to be together as a family without the painful-for-all-involved efforts of trying to get teenagers to chat. But it wasn't long before we couldn't find a show that everyone enjoyed, or we adults couldn't binge with as much commitment as the teens, so we fell behind. Now, except for the sacred Monday night single episode of Friends, Curry and I are on our own.

We usually have one or two shows going at a time. We're all over the map genre-wise; we like British shows, period drama, comedy (though I like smart-funny, he likes stupid-funny), mysteries (without either too much drama or too much angst; humorous murder is our favorite, though rare, genre). We recently watched Inventing Anna, The Great, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Breeders. We're still devoted to Sunday night Masterpiece.

Whatever we're watching together, I have a show going that's mine, something to watch as a reward at the end of the day, after long hours of writing and sorting through emails and jitneying kids here and there, before I start dinner, or while it simmers on the stove, something to binge late into the night when the world gets to be too awful and I don't want to lie in bed thinking about it. 

For my shows, I search for something with women at the center of the storyline. Gilmore Girls carried me through many months of the pandemic. I liked that Curry hated it (ask my kids--it can be fun to irritate other people), and I liked that it was about relationships among women--mothers and daughters and grandmothers, friends and frenemies. I've watched shows about women who surround themselves with men (New Girl, The Mindy Project), shows about how relentless, unforgiving, and thankless motherhood is (Workin' Moms, The Letdown), and shows about women getting older (Grace and Frankie).

My new favorite show, perhaps my favorite show of all, is Jane the Virgin. I'd avoided watching it because the premise is ridiculous (Jane, a virgin, is accidentally artificially inseminated). But when I heard a podcaster whose taste I respect mention it, I gave it a try. And guys, I love it so much. It is ridiculous, but it's also smart and sweet and funny. It pokes gentle fun at the telenovela genre while embracing all of its over-the-top melodrama--crime lords, evil twins, faked deaths, an inordinate number of people killed by being tossed off hotel balconies--in its plot lines, plus a healthy dose of magical realism. But the human emotions, the relationship challenges and triumphs, the everyday experiences of the characters are so real.

And the acting is so good--you believe every emotion Jane has (and she has a lot). They manipulate your emotions as viewer, so that you hate certain characters one episode and love them the next. And though it's ultimately a romance (characters falling in and out of love right and left), the relationships among Jane and her mother and grandmother, as well as her father and her son, take up as least as much space as romance, and are far more interesting. Plus, it takes place in Miami, where everyone where's sundresses all the time, and everything is brightly colored. It makes me feel warm just watching it. I also get to pretend to practice my Spanish whenever Abuela speaks or Rogelio acts in his telenovelas.

As a bonus, Jane's a writer, and the show follows her journey from first published short story to fist bad review (and beyond), without sugarcoating the work that goes into the effort. (I admit, when I see Jane typing after Mateo goes to bed, I feel a little bit guilty that I'm on the couch watching TV). And, coup de grace, Fiesta ware dishes make an appearance in a few scenes, and there's the most gorgeous Art Deco vase in the first episode, in the exam room where Jane's fate is sealed. If that's not enough to make you want to watch, I don't know what is.

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