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meganbmooreJane the Virgin and Happyland are two shows that I hadn't really intended to check out, neither sounding very appealing to me, but I watched the pilots out of boredom and really liked them. The main protagonists of both series-Jane in Jane the Virgin and Lucy in Happyland-are very goal-oriented young Latina women raised by their single mothers, who they are generally more mature and together than. Both mothers-Xiomara in Jane the Virgin ans Elena in Happyland-have lied to their daughters about the identities of their fathers, neither mother wanting to tell her daughter that the last contact they had with the fathers was the fathers telling them to get abortions after learning about the pregnancy, but the real identities of the fathers are revealed in the final moments of both pilots.
But that's mostly where the similarities end.
Jane the Virgin is a case of everything wrong in concept and everything right in concentration. The show is about a 23-year-old waitress named Jane who live with her mother and grandmother. She works at a hotel owned by Rafael and "jerk" (according to both) who she had a crush on when she worked at his country club several years pre-series. Since she was young, her grandmother (who only speaks Spanish, but seems to understand English fairly well) has drilled into her the importance of not having sex until marriage. While there's certainly a religious aspect to this, Jane's grandmother's primary concern seems to be that Jane not also end up a single teenaged mother, and Jane's take on it seems to be that the best way to make sure nothing like that upsets your plans for your life is just to not give it a chance to happen. (I suspect that, to some degree, Jane also sees herself as having ruined Xiomara's life, though Xiomara doesn't seem to have that view at all.) Jane has her life planned out in incredible detail, and her boyfriend, Michael, a police officer, loves her enough to go along with it.
Things get off track when her gynecologist, Luisa, having just had a very soap opera shock the night before, gets her patients mixed up and accidentally artificially inseminates Jane. The woman who was supposed to be artificially inseminated is Rafael's wife, Petra, and Rafael is Luisa's brother. Rafael is a cancer survivor, and because of chemotherapy, he's now sterile. The sperm sample Jane was inseminated with is his only sperm sample, and Petra decided to have herself inseminated to keep Rafael from divorcing her before their 5th anniversary, after which, she gets a much larger divorce settlement. Petra is also having an affair with Rafael's best friend, Roman. Michael is investigating Roman for possible connections to a major drug dealer. Jane initially seems to be leaning towards getting an abortion, but on learning that Rafael wants to have a child and being (falsely) reassured that Rafael and Petra's marriage is happy and stable, she decides to carry the baby to term, and then give it to them to raise. (Because, I mean, Rafael could apparently never consider adoption? The "BIOLOGY ONLY" thing there is my only real beef with the show so far). Jane's father, Rogelio, is the star of the telenovela the whole family is addicted to, and now that he's a moderately mature adult instead of a scared teenager, he wants to get to know his daughter. Xiomara has mixed feelings about this, but not about possibly jumping his bones again.
There's a "Sexy Latin Narrator" to help us keep track of all of this, and more. A lot more. A part of the "lot more" is Bridget Regan running around as a bisexual lawyer in excellent suits and fabulous hair. I know there are some here who will consider that to be very important information.
The series is based on a Venezuelan telenovela, Juana la Vergen, and the consensus between people who've seen both seems to be that Jane the Virgin is both much better, and that it fixes many of the problems of the original. There are several things that make the series pretty great ,as opposed to an awful trainwreck. One is that, despite most situations being approached with humor, the show is very aware that the actual concept is pretty icky, and treats it as such. The shows also chooses to approach it's themes through the women's POVs and choices. Primarily Jane's, but also Xiomara's, and, to a lesser degree, Petra's.
While Petra is a fairly one note greedy schemer in the pilot, she's developed much more sympathetically in the second and third episodes, with her own issues and reasons for the things she does, and the show pretty openly acknowledges that while the current Rafael is nice and sweet and supportive, his past actions give Petra plenty of reasons to do the things she does. While Petra may not actually have an interest in being a mother (I honestly have no idea there) she seems committed to providing a good life for the child that's going to be entrusted to her, and her efforts to befriend Jane seem fairly genuine, and she has a complicated relationship with her own mother.
Xiomara's character-sexually promiscuous singer in tiny cutoffs who lives with her mother and got pregnant at 16-would typically be that of the terrible mother the heroine should want to be nothing like. And while Jane definitely doesn't want make the same life choices as her mother, she does love and respect Xiomara and realize that Xiomara's choices weren't always easy ones (and the show expects us to agree with that POV), and situations that would usually be used to create secondhand audience embarrassment or display what bad choices she makes, this show uses those scenes to say that there isn't only way to be a good mother, and that not being a conventionally good mother doesn't mean you aren't a good mother. In the majority of her scenes, I expect the show to start judging her and saying she's a screw up, and it consistently does the opposite.
Which brings us to Jane herself, Jane's actress, Gina Rodriguez, has been getting a lot of praise for the series, and deservedly so. Most of the "should go horribly wrong" moments in the series don't go horribly wrong because Rodriguez manages to convey both the absurdity and the gravity of those moments, and much of the show's momentum is maintained by it's respect for Jane's choices, and how she deals with those choices. Jane's very detailed life goals and her decision to not have sex before marriage are not treated as making her more virtuous than other women, nor are they treated as her being prudish or too reserved and needing to loosen up and "let her hair down." Jane is just fine the way she is, but she also isn't "better than" others. There's an amazing scene in which Rafael attempts to bond with her by saying she's "not just a waitress" because she has career goals, and Jane's utter contempt at his disparagement of service workers and the idea that she'd be won over by undermining her friends and coworkers leaves him feeling about half an inch tall. (I long for the scene where someone tells Jane she isn't like other girls, because unless she gets a personality transplant, it will be epic.) The decision about the pregnancy is also treated as completely Jane's. While Rafael, Michael, and Jane's family may have their own opinions and wishes about the matter, the actual choices are entirely Jane's, and the show doesn't allow anyone the illusion that anyone but Jane has any actual say in the matter. Rafael wants-really really wants-the baby, but also knows that he has no right to expect (or demand) Jane to spend 9 months of her life to carrying it, and seems to be actively avoiding using his position as her boss to influence her, nor does he try to influence her decision about whether or not to sue Luisa (aka his sister, aka, the one who accidentally inseminated Jane. I've thrown a lot at you since she last came up.) Michael really, really doesn't want the baby, and is scheming to make sure things progress in a way that Jane won't have any reason to change her mind-including blackmailing Petra and accidentally putting her in a dangerous situation, which she managed to extract herself from just fine, thankfully-but there are no illusions that he has any actual say in the matter. The pregnancy comes with Jane, now, and he can either deal with it or not, but it isn't his choice. To his credit, not supporting Jane or breaking up with her because of the situation doesn't seem to ever occur to him. (And it should be noted that my reading of Michael might be negative out of prejudice because I hated Brett Dier's characters in Bomb Girls and Ravenwood so much.)
The show also passes the Bechdel test and its race/sexual orientation variants in most scenes.
Then we have Happyland. Happyland is about workers in a Disneyland-style theme park. The main character, Lucy, grew up in Happyland because her mother, Elena, has played Princess Adriana in the park before Lucy was born, and Lucy works at the park too. Initially, Lucy is the backstage manager for the shows, but she gets forcibly promoted to "character work" early in the series. Her best friends, Will and Harper, are also Happyland employees, and are dating, though Will sometimes forgets which girl he's supposed to be in love with. (Harper rightly interprets this as a problem with Will's priorities that he needs to figure out, and not as something to blame on Lucy, or hold against Lucy.) Lucy Has Plans for her life and doesn't intend to spend her life at Happyland like her mother, Elena. It's hard not to compare Happyland and Jane the Virgin because of the similarities in the heroine's lives and backgrounds, and because Happyland wants to do some of the same things as Jane the Virgin, but doesn't do them as well, though it's still a good-and addicting-show with plenty of soap opera elements.
In the first episode, Lucy clashes with, reluctantly bonds with, and starts to fall for Ian, a new park employee who turns out to be the younger son of James Chandler, the owner of the park. Elena catches them making out and says Lucy can nevereverevereverever kiss Ian again. Because Ian is Lucy's half-brother. Whoopsies. Lucy tells Ian that they're related so that he knows why future makeouts are off the table, but that doesn't stop the show from continuing to write them as the UST will they/won't they pairing. Probably they'll reveal that both of Ian's parent's were having affairs 18 years pre-series and someone else is Ian's biological father, or that Ian is adopted.
But this brings me to one place that I have a lot of issues with where Happyland seems to be going, that I don't have with Jabe the Virgin. Jane the Virgin very much wants us to like (if be somewhat annoyed by) Rogelio and want he and Xiomara to get back together and have him get to know Jane. And I'm ok with that. Rogelio was 16-17 when he told Xiomara to get an abortion and apparently didn't try to contact Xiomara after that. When Xiomara sees him on TV, she sends him a letter telling him about Jane. It takes him a number of months to contact Xiomara after that, but we don't know if he got the letter himself and didn't show up immediately or heard about it later 9I lean towards the later, because he acts like he only just found out, and I think he'd be honest if he knew for a while and just decided to come forward), since she would have been sending it to the address available to fans. When he does reappear, there's every indication that he would have been around and tried to help if he'd known it was still an option.
James is as far from that as possible. Elena is identified as having been a teenager when they were together. At the same times, James was married and a park executive, and his older son, Theo, is in his mid-20s. So, at best, we had a man in his late 20s/early 30s having an affair with an employee who was 18-19 at best. When Elena told him she was pregnant, he sent her a letter telling her to 'get rid of it" and moved to another state, and hasn't contacted her since. At this point, we're meant to believe that he has no idea Lucy is his child. Despite knowing she's 17, being reminded that the affair was 18 years ago, and the fact that Elena has been his employee THE ENTIRE TIME, meaning he could have checked on her at any time. If he doesn't know, it's because he chooses not to. Currently, he's actively pursuing Elena, clearly wanting to rekindle their past relationship. (With his sons there and his wife coming to join them as soon as she finishes her business wherever it is they were living before.) Elena's interest in him is...less clear. She warns Lucy to avoid James, but smiles and flirts with him when he approaches her. It isn't clear whether she's actually interested in him, or if she's just playing along so she and Lucy don't lose their jobs, and possibly get better ones.
Aside from the squick that plotline gives me, though, I really like the show.
Happyland is scheduled to have an 8 episode season, leaving 3 left to air, and 4 for me to watch. CW picked up Jane the Virgin for a full season, so it'll probably be 20-22 episodes. I'm not to sure about it as an ongoing series as opposed to a miniseries, but I have high hopes.
I also watched this week's Sleepy Hollow and greatly enjoyed it, despite the fact that the show is in danger of having a White Dudes problem. I don't have much to say about it, but suspect I'll be much more opinionated about the next episode. I need to catch up with How to Get Away With Murder and Madam Secretary, but they both take themselves more seriously than my current frame of mind wants. (I'll get over it.)
But that's mostly where the similarities end.
Jane the Virgin is a case of everything wrong in concept and everything right in concentration. The show is about a 23-year-old waitress named Jane who live with her mother and grandmother. She works at a hotel owned by Rafael and "jerk" (according to both) who she had a crush on when she worked at his country club several years pre-series. Since she was young, her grandmother (who only speaks Spanish, but seems to understand English fairly well) has drilled into her the importance of not having sex until marriage. While there's certainly a religious aspect to this, Jane's grandmother's primary concern seems to be that Jane not also end up a single teenaged mother, and Jane's take on it seems to be that the best way to make sure nothing like that upsets your plans for your life is just to not give it a chance to happen. (I suspect that, to some degree, Jane also sees herself as having ruined Xiomara's life, though Xiomara doesn't seem to have that view at all.) Jane has her life planned out in incredible detail, and her boyfriend, Michael, a police officer, loves her enough to go along with it.
Things get off track when her gynecologist, Luisa, having just had a very soap opera shock the night before, gets her patients mixed up and accidentally artificially inseminates Jane. The woman who was supposed to be artificially inseminated is Rafael's wife, Petra, and Rafael is Luisa's brother. Rafael is a cancer survivor, and because of chemotherapy, he's now sterile. The sperm sample Jane was inseminated with is his only sperm sample, and Petra decided to have herself inseminated to keep Rafael from divorcing her before their 5th anniversary, after which, she gets a much larger divorce settlement. Petra is also having an affair with Rafael's best friend, Roman. Michael is investigating Roman for possible connections to a major drug dealer. Jane initially seems to be leaning towards getting an abortion, but on learning that Rafael wants to have a child and being (falsely) reassured that Rafael and Petra's marriage is happy and stable, she decides to carry the baby to term, and then give it to them to raise. (Because, I mean, Rafael could apparently never consider adoption? The "BIOLOGY ONLY" thing there is my only real beef with the show so far). Jane's father, Rogelio, is the star of the telenovela the whole family is addicted to, and now that he's a moderately mature adult instead of a scared teenager, he wants to get to know his daughter. Xiomara has mixed feelings about this, but not about possibly jumping his bones again.
There's a "Sexy Latin Narrator" to help us keep track of all of this, and more. A lot more. A part of the "lot more" is Bridget Regan running around as a bisexual lawyer in excellent suits and fabulous hair. I know there are some here who will consider that to be very important information.
The series is based on a Venezuelan telenovela, Juana la Vergen, and the consensus between people who've seen both seems to be that Jane the Virgin is both much better, and that it fixes many of the problems of the original. There are several things that make the series pretty great ,as opposed to an awful trainwreck. One is that, despite most situations being approached with humor, the show is very aware that the actual concept is pretty icky, and treats it as such. The shows also chooses to approach it's themes through the women's POVs and choices. Primarily Jane's, but also Xiomara's, and, to a lesser degree, Petra's.
While Petra is a fairly one note greedy schemer in the pilot, she's developed much more sympathetically in the second and third episodes, with her own issues and reasons for the things she does, and the show pretty openly acknowledges that while the current Rafael is nice and sweet and supportive, his past actions give Petra plenty of reasons to do the things she does. While Petra may not actually have an interest in being a mother (I honestly have no idea there) she seems committed to providing a good life for the child that's going to be entrusted to her, and her efforts to befriend Jane seem fairly genuine, and she has a complicated relationship with her own mother.
Xiomara's character-sexually promiscuous singer in tiny cutoffs who lives with her mother and got pregnant at 16-would typically be that of the terrible mother the heroine should want to be nothing like. And while Jane definitely doesn't want make the same life choices as her mother, she does love and respect Xiomara and realize that Xiomara's choices weren't always easy ones (and the show expects us to agree with that POV), and situations that would usually be used to create secondhand audience embarrassment or display what bad choices she makes, this show uses those scenes to say that there isn't only way to be a good mother, and that not being a conventionally good mother doesn't mean you aren't a good mother. In the majority of her scenes, I expect the show to start judging her and saying she's a screw up, and it consistently does the opposite.
Which brings us to Jane herself, Jane's actress, Gina Rodriguez, has been getting a lot of praise for the series, and deservedly so. Most of the "should go horribly wrong" moments in the series don't go horribly wrong because Rodriguez manages to convey both the absurdity and the gravity of those moments, and much of the show's momentum is maintained by it's respect for Jane's choices, and how she deals with those choices. Jane's very detailed life goals and her decision to not have sex before marriage are not treated as making her more virtuous than other women, nor are they treated as her being prudish or too reserved and needing to loosen up and "let her hair down." Jane is just fine the way she is, but she also isn't "better than" others. There's an amazing scene in which Rafael attempts to bond with her by saying she's "not just a waitress" because she has career goals, and Jane's utter contempt at his disparagement of service workers and the idea that she'd be won over by undermining her friends and coworkers leaves him feeling about half an inch tall. (I long for the scene where someone tells Jane she isn't like other girls, because unless she gets a personality transplant, it will be epic.) The decision about the pregnancy is also treated as completely Jane's. While Rafael, Michael, and Jane's family may have their own opinions and wishes about the matter, the actual choices are entirely Jane's, and the show doesn't allow anyone the illusion that anyone but Jane has any actual say in the matter. Rafael wants-really really wants-the baby, but also knows that he has no right to expect (or demand) Jane to spend 9 months of her life to carrying it, and seems to be actively avoiding using his position as her boss to influence her, nor does he try to influence her decision about whether or not to sue Luisa (aka his sister, aka, the one who accidentally inseminated Jane. I've thrown a lot at you since she last came up.) Michael really, really doesn't want the baby, and is scheming to make sure things progress in a way that Jane won't have any reason to change her mind-including blackmailing Petra and accidentally putting her in a dangerous situation, which she managed to extract herself from just fine, thankfully-but there are no illusions that he has any actual say in the matter. The pregnancy comes with Jane, now, and he can either deal with it or not, but it isn't his choice. To his credit, not supporting Jane or breaking up with her because of the situation doesn't seem to ever occur to him. (And it should be noted that my reading of Michael might be negative out of prejudice because I hated Brett Dier's characters in Bomb Girls and Ravenwood so much.)
The show also passes the Bechdel test and its race/sexual orientation variants in most scenes.
Then we have Happyland. Happyland is about workers in a Disneyland-style theme park. The main character, Lucy, grew up in Happyland because her mother, Elena, has played Princess Adriana in the park before Lucy was born, and Lucy works at the park too. Initially, Lucy is the backstage manager for the shows, but she gets forcibly promoted to "character work" early in the series. Her best friends, Will and Harper, are also Happyland employees, and are dating, though Will sometimes forgets which girl he's supposed to be in love with. (Harper rightly interprets this as a problem with Will's priorities that he needs to figure out, and not as something to blame on Lucy, or hold against Lucy.) Lucy Has Plans for her life and doesn't intend to spend her life at Happyland like her mother, Elena. It's hard not to compare Happyland and Jane the Virgin because of the similarities in the heroine's lives and backgrounds, and because Happyland wants to do some of the same things as Jane the Virgin, but doesn't do them as well, though it's still a good-and addicting-show with plenty of soap opera elements.
In the first episode, Lucy clashes with, reluctantly bonds with, and starts to fall for Ian, a new park employee who turns out to be the younger son of James Chandler, the owner of the park. Elena catches them making out and says Lucy can nevereverevereverever kiss Ian again. Because Ian is Lucy's half-brother. Whoopsies. Lucy tells Ian that they're related so that he knows why future makeouts are off the table, but that doesn't stop the show from continuing to write them as the UST will they/won't they pairing. Probably they'll reveal that both of Ian's parent's were having affairs 18 years pre-series and someone else is Ian's biological father, or that Ian is adopted.
But this brings me to one place that I have a lot of issues with where Happyland seems to be going, that I don't have with Jabe the Virgin. Jane the Virgin very much wants us to like (if be somewhat annoyed by) Rogelio and want he and Xiomara to get back together and have him get to know Jane. And I'm ok with that. Rogelio was 16-17 when he told Xiomara to get an abortion and apparently didn't try to contact Xiomara after that. When Xiomara sees him on TV, she sends him a letter telling him about Jane. It takes him a number of months to contact Xiomara after that, but we don't know if he got the letter himself and didn't show up immediately or heard about it later 9I lean towards the later, because he acts like he only just found out, and I think he'd be honest if he knew for a while and just decided to come forward), since she would have been sending it to the address available to fans. When he does reappear, there's every indication that he would have been around and tried to help if he'd known it was still an option.
James is as far from that as possible. Elena is identified as having been a teenager when they were together. At the same times, James was married and a park executive, and his older son, Theo, is in his mid-20s. So, at best, we had a man in his late 20s/early 30s having an affair with an employee who was 18-19 at best. When Elena told him she was pregnant, he sent her a letter telling her to 'get rid of it" and moved to another state, and hasn't contacted her since. At this point, we're meant to believe that he has no idea Lucy is his child. Despite knowing she's 17, being reminded that the affair was 18 years ago, and the fact that Elena has been his employee THE ENTIRE TIME, meaning he could have checked on her at any time. If he doesn't know, it's because he chooses not to. Currently, he's actively pursuing Elena, clearly wanting to rekindle their past relationship. (With his sons there and his wife coming to join them as soon as she finishes her business wherever it is they were living before.) Elena's interest in him is...less clear. She warns Lucy to avoid James, but smiles and flirts with him when he approaches her. It isn't clear whether she's actually interested in him, or if she's just playing along so she and Lucy don't lose their jobs, and possibly get better ones.
Aside from the squick that plotline gives me, though, I really like the show.
Happyland is scheduled to have an 8 episode season, leaving 3 left to air, and 4 for me to watch. CW picked up Jane the Virgin for a full season, so it'll probably be 20-22 episodes. I'm not to sure about it as an ongoing series as opposed to a miniseries, but I have high hopes.
I also watched this week's Sleepy Hollow and greatly enjoyed it, despite the fact that the show is in danger of having a White Dudes problem. I don't have much to say about it, but suspect I'll be much more opinionated about the next episode. I need to catch up with How to Get Away With Murder and Madam Secretary, but they both take themselves more seriously than my current frame of mind wants. (I'll get over it.)
no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 12:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 12:49 am (UTC)I do suspect, though, that they might be headed towards Michael/Petra, which...hrm. It could be interesting, actually? Or at least, if I liked Michael more. But it'll be hard to see unless he and Jane have a VERY serious break up first.
Petra showing Jane the nursery seemed very...genuine? Like, I'm not sure she intends to stay around permanently (though she seems ok with staying with Rafael, she just wants to make sure she gets the money if they do break up) but she seems pretty committed to upholding her promise about giving the baby a good home.
no subject
Date: 2014-10-30 07:35 am (UTC)Yeah, I mean - maybe she would have the whole 'I Googled it and safety hazard' as a ploy if she anticipated meeting Jane in the apartment, but they were just meeting for coffee. It seems like Petra is a mix between genuine feelings AND prioritizing the heck out of her own needs. Which is cool.