62 MOTHER JONES JULY AUGUST 2019
TARA JACOBY 2016 , 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 trivializ-
ing, 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?
Jane the Virgin is the sort of television that often gets
called a “guilty pleasure,” code for “women watch this.”
Jane lives with her religious grandmother and freewheel-
ing mother; the three of them share a deep, enduring love
of telenovelas. The show plays with telenovela tropes and
themes, which means it’s heavy on the plot twists, but Jane’s
genius is that for all the clever involutions and sweeping
plots, it never loses touch with its essential humanity.
“It’s a show about a certain kind of TV that I feel like
people often refer to in condescending ways,” Emily Nuss-
baum, the TV critic for TheNew Yorker, tells me. “I don’t
think that people always have the language to talk about
how they love the show without having that refl exive con-
descension—‘Oh, you know, it’s just for fun, it’s very silly,it’s a girlie show,’ and things like that.”
Nussbaum is the author of a new collection, I Like to
Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution. The book
is full of that language she thinks we’re lacking in this Qual-
ity Television era: the language of loving wholeheartedly
something to which the culture will only condescend. The
essays add up to a necessary revisionist portrait of the past
two decades. Sure, there were all those brooding, brilliant
shows about di cult men—such shows always win the sort
of accolades they are aff orded by virtue of their masculin-
ity. But Nussbaum’s unspoken project is to steer the “girlie”
stuff into the realm of critical acclaim—shows like Crazy Ex-
Girlfriend, a clever meditation on mental illness whose tone
shifts easily between heartbreaking and hilarious without
giving the viewer emotional whiplash. Or Grey’s Anatomy,
the seemingly endless medical drama that gave us Cristina
Yang, who never apologized for her consuming ambition,
not to mention its namesake, Meredith Grey, who evolved
in ways an actual human might change over a 15-year period
(give or take a plane crash). Or even Sex and the City, which
deconstructed the romantic comedy as surely and as deftly
as The Sopranos took apart the mob show, with an antihero
to match.Here were the television programs doing what we
might call the invisible labor of the revolution.
Jane lies at the spiritual heart of I Like to Watch. “There’s a
level at which the entire book is created because of Jane theTHE XXFILES
Emily Nussbaum re-genders the Quality Television canon.
MIXED MEDIA