Jane the Virgin's Minority Themes Make It a Serious Sitcom Hit

January 15, 2015 at 7:51 PM UTC

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This article is part of the January 19, 2015 issue of businessweek.

Jane the Virgin often feels like a soap opera, full of secret identities, love triangles, and over-the-top twists. But the show, which airs on Mondays at 9 p.m. on CW, is more accurately a soap satire—with a snappy script by a former Gilmore Girls writer and an unseen narrator who mocks the show’s implausibility. (Sample voice-over: “And so Jane explained that a man professing his love on a yacht, in the snow, in front of a semirealistic background, was the epitome of romance.”) Based on a Venezuelan show of the same name, it’s basically a telenovela for people who hate telenovelas.

The sitcom has also become this season’s biggest sleeper hit. According to Nielsen, roughly 1.9 million people, 68 percent of them female, tune in every week, making it CW’s biggest show in years. The network’s twentysomething audience has slipped away of late as millennials who watched Gossip Girl and The Vampire Diaries abandoned traditional networks for streaming content. CW, jointly owned by Warner Bros. and CBS, was losing as much as $100 million a year, says the New York Times. It needed better programming. Jane filled that void: The show will return on Jan. 19 with a Golden Globe win for its lead actor, Gina Rodriguez.