On The High Art Of Telenovelas

And, action. It’s Season 2 of “Jane the Virgin ,” and Jane (Gina Rodriguez), the show’s hardworking heroine, is in a spat with her creative writing professor. The two have been in an episodes-long standoff about the value of Jane’s genre of choice: romance. Her professor asks that Jane write scenes that pass the Bechdel Test , focusing on supposedly deeper issues than passionate love.

Meanwhile, Jane defends her genre as honest and real in its own right. She’s steadfast in her want to write a romance novel, never giving into pressure from graduate school faculty members whose focus is literary fiction. (For the record, this is totally not how MFA programs work, but, pedantry aside, Jane’s grad school struggles illuminate the very real problem of genre snobbery.)

It’s never said outright why Jane prefers romance, but it’s implied that she finds the expression of unbridled passion freeing; as a perfectionist , trying on more brazen personas is almost surreal, a complete subversion of her own daily experiences.

She also might’ve gotten the idea from telenovelas. When she’s not working a double, playing with her son, or typing in a fury, Jane spends time on the couch with her mother and grandmother, lapping up the scenes served to them by “The Passions of Santos ,” a telenovela about a handsome politician. In the show’s first season, this pastime is lightly mocked, until, in a telenovela-like twist, it’s revealed that Santos is played by none other than Jane’s long-lost father, Rogelio. It’s the first in a serious of wending plotlines that poke fun at melodramatic tropes, only to embrace them later. By doing the cynical, critical work for you, the show frees you to experience the fear, anxiety and passion of its characters firsthand. There’s no need to cringe at the baldness of these emotions; the narrator already does.

Just as “UnREAL” pulls back the curtain on reality TV, “Jane the Virgin” examines the silly, stilted aspects of telenovelas. But unlike “UnREAL,” “Jane” goes a step further, allowing you to lavish in the very emotional displays it mocks, acknowledging that there is value in the genre.

In a phone conversation with HuffPost, Ilan Stavans, Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, explained that people love telenovelas because of the genre’s superficiality, not in spite of it. “People want that fake, the artificiality of it,” Stavans said. “What people want to see is the very stern faces with lots of makeup and music in the background.”

A single episode of “Jane” -- let alone an entire season -- speeds around sharp, shocking plot turns. There are evil twins, heartthrob detectives, love triangles and serial killers disguised with plastic surgery. There are cheesy special effects ranging from silent movie scenes to actually glowing hearts. But there’s also something surreal about it all: when Jane and her love interest Michael share a reuniting kiss, time slows down and (fake) snow flutters from the sky. Such theatrics might not happen in real life, but they do happen inside the minds of romantics, and so they are, in a sense, real.

“It’s hard to say if they are mirroring reality or if reality is mirroring telenovelas, in that they spill over excesses of emotion that becomes melodrama,” Stavans said. “One could also argue that Hispanic culture has emotions at its core, and that telenovelas are an expression of all that.”

This approach to storytelling must resonate with viewers; “Jane the Virgin” has been renewed for a third season, and it’s not just the narrator’s snark that’s alluring. Last year, an online, serialized book spinoff of “The Passions of Santos ,” the show’s central telenovela, was published on Wattpad, garnering nearly 20,000 readers.

Besides the laying bare of strong feelings, what is it about the romantic structure of these stories that appeals? For one, their puzzling, maze-like structure keeps viewers hooked, and actively engaged.

“The stories of telenovelas are often like a labyrinth,” Stavans said. “You can very quickly get lost. I think in that sense, they relate very much with [the Spanish] comedia, and I think people like those complications.”

And, although they may seem antiquated in their views on romance, telenovelas can be progressive vehicles for change. “They can deal with issues of birth control and intolerance,” Stavans said. “It is also very connected with how wealth is understood in Latin America.”

Similarly, “Jane the Virgin” uses the template of dogmatic and conservative sitcoms à la “Seventh Heaven” -- those shows typically built for touting rigid conceptions of family values -- to tell stories about single motherhood, post-partum depression, deportation and other less-understood circumstances that deserve discussion. Where it could fall easily into hackneyed ideas about family, “Jane” normalizes the taboo, not with humor, which can be isolating, but with feelings.

If telenovelas and stories like them are progressive, expressive and engaging, why are we snobby about them? Stavans suggests that the judgment comes from within Latin American countries, where supposed high culture and low culture are less interchangeable than they are in the U.S. It’s a topic he’s passionate about because, as an academic, he sees a disturbing lack of literature on telenovelas compared with other forms of popular culture.

“I think in the United States, there is not a very sharp distinction between what the upper classes view as entertainment and what the working class sees as entertainment. Art and culture can travel from one corner of society to another very easily. And sometimes something will start in the margins and move to the center,” he said. “But in Latin America that doesn’t happen. The upper class and the upper middle class look down at what the masses are digesting.”

Perhaps a show like “Jane the Virgin,” with its wide pendulum swings between sarcasm and sincerity, is what we needed to introduce the genre to a bigger audience. With its quippy narrator silencing our inner critics, we’re finally able to relax, and find the meaning in the melodrama.

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Follow Maddie Crum on Twitter: @maddiecrum