![]() Happy to be watching this one for the long haul. ![]() Without giving too much away about tonight’s premiere (I’ll have a spoiler-filled review after it airs), I’ll say that the show once again takes a story idea that could have been ruinous and turns it into something smart and rewarding. ![]() When I saw the pilot, I thought, “This is well-made, but I can’t imagine watching past week three or four.” Then at week four, it was, “This is still good, but I’m worried it could fall apart at any minute.” By mid-season, it had become clear that Jennie Urman and company knew what they were doing and could very effortlessly shift from comedy to melodrama, invest even the broadest characters with humanity, and sidestep obvious traps that would screw up the narrative or the tonal balance. ![]() “Jane the Virgin” (Tonight at 9, CW): Simultaneously a funny parody of telenovelas and a genuine example of one, “Jane” was one of last season’s most pleasant surprises, simply because it kept avoiding all the pitfalls that tend to come up in any young soap, and particularly a self-aware type like this. I’ll have individual pieces on all these shows at different points in the week, but a few general thoughts right now: In particular, it’s interesting because it features the sophomore debuts of five series that were either very good or great in their first seasons: “Jane the Virgin,” “Fargo,” “Manhattan,” “Kingdom,” and “The Knick.” In Peak TV in America, though, big premiere weeks can happen at any time, like the mid-October one we’re in right now. The last full week in September was when the broadcast networks premiered most of their fall shows, cable networks would start rolling out their big guns in the first or second week of January (also when the networks started debuting their midseason replacements), and there would often be a third wave of network and cable stuff in mid-March. Once upon a time, there were obvious weeks to get excited about TV premieres. ![]()
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