Illustration by Ben Kirchner

A few weeks ago, the CW aired a perfect episode of “Jane the Virgin,” directed by its star Gina Rodriguez. It had five plots, ranging from poignant to zany. Each scene was tinted in pastels, like a plate of macarons. There were two gorgeous dresses and three hot consummations, plus a cliffhanger, several heart-to-hearts, and Brooke Shields getting attacked by a wolf on live TV. As usual, the world took all this perfection for granted.

“Jane the Virgin,” which débuted in 2014, is an extremely loose adaptation of a Venezuelan telenovela in which a poor teen-ager has the ultimate “whoops” pregnancy: she’s accidentally impregnated via artificial insemination, then falls for the wealthy bio dad. For the American version, the creator, Jennie Snyder Urman, added a fabulous framing device—a Latin-lover narrator who punctuates his remarks with the refrain “Just like a telenovela, right?” An excitable fanboy who tosses out Twitter hashtags like confetti, the narrator (voiced by the very funny Anthony Mendez) works as a bridge to the globally popular genre, but he also helps link it to other women’s “stories”: the soap, the rom-com, the romance novel, and, more recently, reality television. These are the genres that get dismissed as fluff, which is how our culture regards art that makes women’s lives look like fun. They’re “guilty pleasures,” not unlike sex itself. Women use this language, too—even Rodriguez, in interviews, has compared her show to red-velvet cupcakes and Justin Bieber.

In fact, “Jane the Virgin” is more like a joyful manifesto against that very putdown, a bright-pink filibuster exposing the layers in what the world regards as shallow. When the American version begins, Jane is twenty-three, living in Miami, and still a virgin, torn between her devout Catholic grandmother and her wild-thing mom, who had her at sixteen. Her soul mate, Rafael, is a roguish hotel heir—and the show gives him meaningful competition, in the form of a nice-guy detective, Michael, whom Jane eventually marries. But, in four seasons, the show has expanded far beyond that formative love triangle. Jane has been a single mom, a happily married woman, and a devastated widow. The virgin part disappeared in Season 3, the word scratched out every week in the titles.

Beyond these plot tweaks, however, the show made a bolder move, cross-hatching the narrative with self-referential inventions, frame inside frame inside frame. Jane, her abuela Alba, and her mother, Xiomara, relax by watching telenovelas, just as the Gilmore girls once watched screwball comedies. Jane’s ambition is to write romance novels—and, when she goes to grad school, she spars with a romance-hating feminist professor, played by the show’s frequent director, Melanie Mayron (Melissa Steadman, on “Thirtysomething”). Jane’s long-lost father, Rogelio De La Vega (Jaime Camil), is the hilariously vain star of the telenovela “The Passions of Santos” (and, for a while, of a reality show called “De La Vega-Factor Factor,” along with a matchmaker named Darci Factor). This season, the U.S. version of “The Passions of Santos” has been picked up—on the condition that it also feature Rogelio’s latest nemesis, America’s sweetheart River Fields (Shields, naturally), star of “The Green Lagoon.”

The meta television show is hardly a new invention. And, in one sense, “Jane” is simply the latest in a tradition of ambitious shows that both emulate and deconstruct established TV genres, from “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” (daytime soaps) to “BoJack Horseman” (nineties sitcoms). But one of the striking things about “Jane the Virgin” is that it is never truly ironic, let alone condescending to its source material. It is a deeply heartfelt production, sweet without being saccharine, as well as sophisticated about and truly interested in all the varieties of love, from familial to carnal. It’s a smart show that parents and teen-agers can watch together—which, in a better world, might be a recommendation to a larger audience. Although it employs all the tools of high melodrama—evil twins, gaslighting—it doesn’t have a camp sensibility. Instead, it ballasts the most outrageous twists with realistic emotional responses. How would you feel if your twin stole your identity and drugged you into paralysis, thus intensifying your postpartum depression? This is one show that will take your trauma seriously.

The performances are equally layered, particularly a breakout one by Yael Grobglas, as both Petra, Rafael’s ex-wife, and Anezka, the aforementioned evil twin. A Czech street hustler turned glam hotelier, Grobglas’s Petra glides from Carole Lombard daffiness to Grace Kelly hauteur, noir to slapstick to heartbreak, often within a scene. For two seasons, I kept forgetting that the twins were played by one person, let alone one person acting like one character pretending to be the other character pretending to be the first character.

Without a marquee director in the credits, “Jane” rarely comes up in conversations about visually provocative television, but it should: it has an unusual optical density, somehow managing to be simultaneously meditative and manic. Spanish speakers, like Alba, get subtitles. But other captions bubble across the screen, to underscore plot points or to add visual punch lines: the “one hour later” that stripes a set of double doors cracks in half when a character walks through them. Rogelio’s overeager tweeting provides entire subplots. When lovers text, words appear and disappear as they edit, letting us enter their thoughts.

And then there’s the show’s frequent backdrop, the Marbella hotel, a dreamy castle full of turquoise sofas. Color is a huge part of the show’s appeal: hearts throb pink when people are in love; Rogelio’s lavender accessories are flags for his moods. Lacking the big bucks of pay cable, “Jane” turns the CW’s limitations into advantages, making elegant use of the screen, often through a kind of flirtatious denial. When Jane gazes to her right during a dinner at the Marbella, her face blocks our view of the seductive text that Rafael has sent her. When the two finally make love, we get mere flashes of flesh in the shower: her arm, his back, her hip. “Come on, I can’t show you everything,” the narrator tells us. “We’re not on HBO.”

Despite that meta wisecrack, that sex scene is genuinely steamy, and not just because it’s set in a shower: it’s the consummation of an attraction that has lasted four seasons. Telenovelas have a long tradition as transmitters of social messages; in Mexico, the government used hit shows as vehicles to advocate for family planning. Our own government would surely deplore the messages “Jane” sends: like the Netflix series “One Day at a Time,” it puts Latino immigrants, including undocumented workers, at the center of the story. It also goes deep on women’s health, with plots that include Jane’s struggle to breast-feed and a crisp, unapologetic story about abortion. Once in a while, there’s a corny note of edutainment—a bisexual-boyfriend plot had this vibe—but it’s a rarity.

Still, there’s a tricky tension in the show between its family-time warmth and its fascination with sex itself, a subject that it has examined seriously, and increasingly graphically, in a way that many theoretically adult shows do not. “Jane” is respectful to the devout Alba (wonderfully portrayed by Ivonne Coll), who crumpled a flower and told Jane that that was her virtue, if she gave it away. But it’s also an advocate for moving past shame. In that same perfect episode, the one in which Jane and Rafael finally get it on, there’s a story in which Alba confesses the real reason that she ended things with her boyfriend, once he proposed: she’s frightened of sex, having not had it for thirty years. “You get used to things—or not having things,” she tells her granddaughter, in a moving, simple sequence. Jane argues that her abuela isn’t, as she sees herself, “broken”—but her solution is not to tell Alba to jump in bed with a man but to take her shopping for a vibrator and some lubricant. In that montage of three sexual awakenings, the septuagenarian gets one of them. Refreshingly, the moment is not played for laughs: in Jane’s world, sex, like love, is a bright color that everyone deserves to see. ♦