SEPTEMBER: Jane the Newsletter Topic and Dead To Me's Complexity
Dear Kelsey,
It's been a brutal few weeks and all I want is to lay around and sleep all the time, so this letter might be a little shorter than usual. I have a nap and aimless watches of She-Ra to get back to!
Yesterday I read this piece by Shea Serrano on Scrubs and in particular, Dr. Perry Cox, which made me cry. I am a complete and total sap for grouchy people with hearts of gold, of which Dr. Cox is one of them. Scrubs is extremely underrated and even though we're about to give you two more TV recommendations, please gently consider adding this to your list before forgetting about it entirely. J.D. Dorian and I beg of you.
(All aboard the SCRUBS train amiright?)
Like many of the shows we've covered so far this year (can you believe this is our NINTH edition of the newsletter???), I knew from the start that we would cover Jane the Virgin at some point. When JtV premiered in 2014, I was a 19-year-old, idealistic college student who planned to remain a virgin until marriage. The only thing that hasn't changed in the last 5 years is my idealism and Jane's weekly presence on my laptop. *wink*
Jane the Virgin is essentially a story about a 23-year-old working class woman named Jane who is accidentally artificially inseminated before she's ever had sex. Jane wrestles with religion in a Latinx-American family, consent, immigration justice, becoming a mother, fear of the unknown, and how to learn what we want and go after it in life, but all in the over-the-top kind of way that best suits a true telenovela. (Read this excellent essay by our PenPals patron saint Kathryn VanArendonk on Vulture about how JtV uses the drama of telenovelas to actually depict the normal parts of life in a more honest way.)
(Pretty much major spoilers from here on out if you haven't seen past Season 3 and you're planning to before reading.)
I always liked the show, but it changed for me at the end of Season 3. I've never been secretive about the fact that for the first few seasons I was staunchly Team Michael. Michael, her first real love, who makes her laugh and kisses her under drafty roofs and does the tough thing because it's right. So imagine my utter shock and horror when Michael DIES, without warning, after taking his LSAT.
Quite suddenly, the show takes a sharp turn from fun and light and dramatic into profoundly full of grief. Jane's world as she knows it has ended--there's no going back to the tone the show had before, not after this. One of the people Jane loves most has been stripped away from her, and she now has to contend with a universe where the people we love leave us. This is not an easy challenge for a romantic comedy.
Something happened to the show after Michael's death. JtV suddenly possessed a depth and emotional wisdom it didn't have before. Jane wasn't just a quirky 20-something mom anymore--she was a widow. She had unpredictable waves of grief in restaurants and bookstores and in front of her son, who watched her grow on screen along with the rest of us. She spent 3 years in therapy. She cried when she started dating again, and no one felt the way Michael did. And she eventually fell in love again, more softly and slowly, the way grief slows and softens us. My love and devotion to Jane, to the woman she was becoming, deepened in a way I didn't know it could before.
AND THEN THEY BROUGHT MICHAEL BACK BUT WITH AMNESIA AND I FUCKING HATED EVERY SECOND OF IT. It turns out, after an entire season of her healing after his death, Michael is actually NOT dead!!! I WAS SO INFURIATED, KELSEY. I was so hurt for Jane. Giving her this half-baked plot where Michael returns but doesn't remember anything and then having their love dry up as she had to keep proving to Rafael how much she loves him is deeply unfair to the journey Jane had been leading up to that point. Some might say that's just good storytelling that I was frustrated on her behalf, but I would argue that bringing Michael back like that just to have him move on with his life so that we could all know Jane *chose* Rafael is lazy plot writing and, quite frankly, toxic monogamy. WHY COULDN'T SHE JUST HAVE LOVED BOTH? ONE WAS DEAD, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! This is why we can't have nice things.
I liked that they ended the show on episode 100, though. That's a nice touch. The final season felt rushed by the season finale was lovely. I'll admit it, I cried. Jane deserved her happy ending, and I was happy to see her get it. CW outdid themselves with Jane the Virgin AND Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, can't wait to see what else they come up with.
Before I move on, I just have to drop a shameless thirst trap of the iconic Justin Baldoni, who I like far more than the character he plays (sorry, Rafael). Justin's passion for a healthy, tender masculinity shows through so beautifully in the transformation of Rafael over all 5 seasons and it is DELIGHTFUL to see Justin living his best life. (He has an incredible TED talk on masculinity that I highly recommend.) Good for you, boo!
It might seem like Dead to Me and Jane the Virgin don't have a lot in common, but grief is a recurring plotline through both of them--obviously more overtly in Dead to Me (see: the literal title). Jen Harding (played by Christina Applegate) is a hard-ass real estate agent who is attending a grief support group for the unexpected death of her husband, where she meets Judy Hale (Linda Cardellini), a quirky but endearing local artist who attends the group for the loss of her fiance (ooooor so she claims, spoilers to come below).
I googled the show before writing this and apparently it's considered a "dark comedy"? Which, okay, are we just calling anything comedy these days? Me eating a banana is comedy. My extremely non-tight 5-minute standup bit I do in the shower is comedy. Me talking on the phone to my mother is comedy. (The last one might actually be true tbh.) This show is a drama/thriller with some jokes in it. It is not a dark comedy. Get it together, TV genre gods.
THE CASTING! I never knew how much I would live for Linda Cardellini as an extremely loyal, slightly unhinged middle aged woman! I loved her as Lindsay Weir in Freaks and Geeks, which I watched for the first time about 2 years ago which was apparently exactly the right time because the last 2 years have given us a major resurgence of Linda Cardellini television content. Linda puts on a truly magnificent performance as the flighty, anxious, needy Judy, matched by Christina's unbelievable tough-yet-soft Jen (my kryptonite, see Dr. Cox).
A TV PLOT BASED ENTIRELY AROUND FEMALE FRIENDSHIP! This is like the much, much darker version of Life Partners (which we lovingly reviewed in our March 2019 letter), which I am extremely into. If there's any recurring theme among these letters besides the funny memes, it's that we deeply stan television that gives the depth and complexity of women's friendships the kind of attention and richness that they deserve. D2M not only shows the complexity of female friendship, it also shows the darkest sides of codependency and dysfunction in times of grief. Even in the midst of so much darkness on this show, there's also so much beauty. Jen and Judy find each other during deep pain and struggle for both of them, and in the other they find peace and understanding and connection. And they should both see therapists immediately.
Thanks for not killing my husband and covering it up. Love you dearly,
Hannah
Dear Hannah,
Thank you for your delightful letter, which was truly a balm and a tonic as I continue to reel about how terrible IT: Chapter Two was. That movie was terrible down to its BONES and I am upset. Those kids in the first movie worked so hard despite being so underserved!! Not even Jessica Chastain could save this movie from itself, and that is SAYING SOMETHING. Readers: if you are the kind of person who is going to see IT: Chapter Two in the theater no matter what [me]...I am so sorry for our loss [also be advised that the movie opens with an extremely graphic hate crime]. Let us all come together in mourning and talk instead about how good the 1990 miniseries was and how attracted I am to that version's Ben Hanscom:
Now, blessedly, we turn our eyes away from the barrens [this is an IT joke] of Media Created By Men, to the flowering glen of Jane the Virgin. Spoilers will abound.
I knew I was for real and actual in love with this show when someone ripped their own face off.
I did like it before this incredibly dramatic moment that managed to stand out in a show full of incredibly dramatic moments, and had in fact probably been falling in love with it for quite awhile and simply not noticing. My original pull into the show was the mother/daughter/granddaughter trio, because I am addicted to anything that even vaguely reminds me of Gilmore Girls (which Jennie Snyder Urman also worked on), and I started casually watching during my final semester of college. But it wasn't until the end of season 2, when I was sitting in my first post-college residence, that I realized the power this show had over me. You wrote gorgeously of the change that occurs in the show in Season 3, and I think it was then for me that I realized how the show was changing me as well, that if Gilmore Girls shaped my high school and college years, JtV was the show of my early and mid 20s.
You've already linked to one of the Kathryn VanArendonk pieces about the show that *I* was planning on linking to, you minx!, but I'm going to do it again anyway, because I got choked up at this particular part:
"It's hard to point to the things that feel so deeply embedded in life, to wrestle them out of the mundane constancy of everyday routine and hold them up for examination. It's hard to get enough separation from life to see life clearly. It's hard to write about the end of Jane the Virgin because, over the last five years, the show has been that distancing lens, supplying the fantasy that clarifies all the messy complexity of motherhood, friendship, marriage, career."
My points of connection are a bit different than VanArendonk's; I'm not married or a parent [though the show has informed a lot of my feelings about both of those things], but I feel like I could write a dissertation and an entire book of essays on the way the title card shifts after Jane has sex for the first time near the beginning of Season 3, typing out 'Jane the Virgin' as usual, and then crossing out the 'virgin' for a more episode-specific identifier, especially as she reconsiders what sex means and doesn't mean to her after Michael.
And all the mother-daughter stuff!! The show is clear from the beginning that the Villanueva women are a tight-knit group, but there are also some obvious fault lines within their relationships. They all struggle with feeling rejected and judged by one another, despite all being good people who love each other very much and are all doing their best. In Kathryn VanArendonk's wonderful profile of Jennie Snyder Urman, Urman talks about her approach to the dilemmas the Villanuevas and those close to them face throughout the series: "I was really, actively thinking, Can a protagonist be an interesting person if they're also a really good person? Can their life be complicated if they're not doing all these terrible things and forced into these extreme situations?" Jane is forced into extreme situations, but her dilemmas come from trying to be a good person in the middle of them."
From that perspective the show has a lot in common with The Good Place, which we talked about in our very first newsletter, including the fact that both shows help us process everyday questions of ethical human relationships against a truly wild background. The characters in the two shows, however, come from very different starting places. The Good Place takes a collection of self-described human trash bags and gradually teaches them that their best shot at "goodness" comes from learning to form and maintain caring connections with one another. The characters in Jane the Virgin are already starting from those connections, and instead are challenged to explore what it means to live in the tensions of independence and empathy, tenderness and truth, vulnerability and valor. Throughout the show these three women learn how to really see each other and grapple with the raw feelings they'd been brushing off or suppressing for years.
That growth also happens with characters like Rogelio, Rafael, and Petra. When I think about the growth of Rogelio from a self-obsessed diva into a genuinely thoughtful partner and father [who's still a bit self-obsessed, but in a charming way!], of Rafael from cold-hearted business rake to compassionate family man, and Petra from a conniving ice princess who would sacrifice anyone for her own benefit into someone unafraid to lay it all on the line for the people she cares about......THE TEARS, THEY FLOW.
I think the massive amounts of growth from all the characters in Seasons 3 and 4 might be why the final season felt like such a disappointment. [Well, that and the Michael Thing, more on that in a bit.] While I truly believe that there is good television to be made about good people who love each other and are trying their best, a plot that hinges so much on wild plot twists can reach a point where balance is simply impossible...at least for now. I also believe that JtV is a truly revolutionary show, one that has the potential to influence storytelling in ways that we couldn't possibly predict right now.
You've already written splendidly about why the decision to bring back Michael didn't work [plus I'm approaching my 'Reasonable Word Count' limit--I swear I always start these things thinking "ugh I have nothing to say" and then get halfway in and start panicking "OH NO I HAVE TOO MUCH TO SAY"] so I'll just add a full-chested "yes you are correct!!" I was never the world's biggest Michael person; for whatever reason, something about him just rubbed me the wrong way. But even as a stolid Team Raf'er, I felt like the new quasi-Michael was just damned disrespectful to the REAL Michael!!
I don't have a smooth transition into talking about Dead to Me, but then again the show didn't have a smooth transition into the "comedy" category. *ba-dum-tsss*
This show is like if Santa Clarita Diet [an ACTUAL comedy] had a baby with How To Get Away With Murder. The twists! The betrayal! The delusional comfort that everything might just be okay after all getting ripped away in the final 30 seconds of every episode!! But while SCD is about marriage and HTGAWM is about how you should never trust anyone in law school, D2M is about the main juice of our newsletter.....female friendship!!!!
It's also about female anger, which has been a Hot Button Topic lately. Women have a lot to be angry about! And every production in the world seems to want to get into it, which occasionally gives us...less than satisfying results (coughHandmaid'sTalecough). But even with alllll the different portrayals of female anger out there, this one stood out to me.
We know from the very first episode that Jen, Christina Applegate's character, is very, very angry. She's angry at fast drivers, she's angry at the police, she's angry at the fumbling neighbors who don't know what to say, and she's angry at her own grief. [Spoilers ahead] And when she learns halfway through the season that her husband had been cheating on her for a year and a half before he died, her anger seems to become unmanageable. But we the viewers start to learn something too: her anger has always been unmanageable. We learn that it's lost her clients, lost her friendships, and that the night her husband died she hit him.
Women's anger in TV and movies is almost always portrayed as one of two things: 1. silly, or, more recently, 2. a completely legitimate "fuck you" [often to ~the patriarchy~ as a whole along with whatever or whoever else] that, though it may have external plot-related consequences, has no internal moral weight. Jen's is allowed to be neither: she can have a lot of good reasons to be angry, but also be forced to acknowledge that the way she handles [or doesn't handle] that anger is destructive to herself and everyone around her. As much as I love the many twisty turns and reveals, I really hope that the second season of the show doesn't get too swept up in them and continues to dig into this nuance.
And now, in like, a ~nuanced~ way, as we say goodbye to Hot Girl Summer/Horny Summer, I have a confession: I've spent a nonzero time the last month thinking about what it might be like to kiss Jason Statham. It's possible Horny Summer 2k19 has gone too far and we could all use a bit of a cool down.
Yours in love and ranting,