Round 3

 

JANE THE VIRGIN

VS

THE AFFAIR

 

When the writers at the PopFilter headquarters, or the hosts of the various PopFilter podcasts, have to review a television show based only on the pilot they form an opinion filled with caveats and asterisks. There’s no way of knowing what changes the show will make after its first episode. Just recently, the second episode of Constantine had to do the job of both a pilot and a second episode, thanks to all the changes the network made after the pilot was shot (this didn’t stop them from airing the pilot anyway.) With the Fall TV Bracket, we thought we’d be able to sidestep some of these problems. In the first round of the bracket, all 33 shows had to compete with just their pilot,with each round introducing new episodes, giving us a better sense of which shows were good and which shows didn’t have what it takes to make it to the finals. It could only help each show, having more time to flesh out their characters and explore their themes and premise, right?

 

The Affair had an incredible stable of talent, from the cast to the show creators. It had a cushy spot, Sundays on pay cable, which all but guarantees quality thanks to the spotlight on that night. And it had a pilot that, despite some tonal flaws, showed a lot of promise. It had all of the makings of television crack: a prestige drama with a mystery done Rashomon style making awards AND rabid returning viewers all but a done deal. Each episode did a mostly decent job of rewarding viewers with a little scandal, a little sex, and a couple of questions answered with twice as many questions asked. It didn’t seem like it was going to replace Breaking Bad as the new show an entire nation could champion, but it was at least a step up for Showtime, who has bludgeoned us over the head with their bullshit shows for the last couple of years. And then the fourth episode aired – the last of the episodes to be reviewed for its battle against a fucking CW show, of all things – and everything fell apart. It turns out that the worst thing a show about two people having an affair could do is air a two-hander featuring just the man and woman involved in the affair.

 

Instead of showing us both Noah (Dominic West) and Alison’s (Ruth Wilson) different takes on specific moments of their affair (boys and girls see things differently, just so you know), episode four gives us Noah’s angle leading up to the couple having sex for the first time, and Alison’s angle of the aftermath of the sex. This essentially removes the main gimmick from the show, but that’s fine. The gimmick needed a break, anyway. What it also does, though, is keep Noah and Alison together. With each other. In almost every scene. Talking. Sometimes screwing. Mostly talking. It turns out – and I don’t know how I didn’t notice before – that Noah and Alison are fucking morons, whose complete lack of anything interesting say makes for negative chemistry. Whatever pulse this show had in previous episodes must be the supporting cast and the impending destruction of their families as opposed to these two Cary-Grant-and-Katherine-Hepburn-ing it up throughout the Hamptons. Every time this particular episode goes to do something interesting, like one character needing the other to talk him or her in to or out of the affair, the other character follows it up by saying something blindingly stupid. It’s not necessarily contrived, like the writers needed the characters to do something a little off in order to get them where they needed to be. It’s more like the writers spin a giant wheel of random phrases and responses, and whatever the wheel lands on is what needs to happen. Is this just an off-episode for The Affair, and it will find its bearings by episode five? Maybe, but it no longer matters. You only need to fuck up once to get your ass handed to you by one of the best new shows of this fall; a show that has the strongest first four episodes of any show in recent memory.

 

Jane the Virgin is a runaway train of sheer fucking glee. It would have been hard for any show to keep it out of the finals, off-episode or not. I want to make it perfectly clear that this isn’t one show winning thanks only to another show taking a dump. This was a much-anticipated drama getting throttled by a telenovela-inspired CW show. The world of TV is a wacky place where anything can happen.

 

The most impressive thing about Jane the Virgin is that this is an impossible sentence to finish by just picking one thing. The show began with so much confidence and self-awareness – more so than many good shows do with their second season premieres – and builds on those things every episode. One of the secrets of Jane‘s success is not just its ability to spin an absurdly soapy web of plotlines with each web shooting out into different webs, but that it wraps up some of those plotlines as it moves along. In other words, it tells a story as opposed to planting an endless row of seeds in the hope that it can trick you into coming back every week, whether you want to or not. And if that makes it seem too daunting to just jump in on the fifth episode, fear not: an incredibly pithy narrator with a silky smooth voice is on hand to help you along whenever you need it, while never slogging down the show for the viewers that have been there since the beginning. There are shows that Jane the Virgin is easy to compare to – The O.C. comes to mind, because it always does for any situation – but if you think about it, there’s really only one show to compare it to: What other show in TV history had this many well-rounded, compelling pyschopaths, each demanding more screen time than they get, and involved in so many plotlines a joke-telling narrator is necessary in order to help us understand everything? OK, so it’s not on that show’s level yet, and the comedic tones are totally different, but you’d be surprised how close the comp is.

 

The show mainly focuses on three generations of Latin women living in the same house, so I’d like to focus on the only white male supporting character, because I just don’t think they get enough publicity in general. Jane’s fiancee has to deal with the fact that she’s pregnant with another man’s baby, the fact that she wants to remain a virgin until married, and the fact that she might have feelings for her baby daddy. He is conniving, manipulating things to make sure that Jane doesn’t decide to keep the baby, forcing him to raise another man’s child. And both despite and because of all of these things, he is an incredibly well rounded, three-dimensional character, who never falls into the trap of selfish, douche-bag boyfriend, or a boring Dudley Do-Right. The shit he does makes sense. And he might be the most underwritten character on the show. Even the characters who would normally not need to be anything more than walking plot devices, like Jane’s baby-daddy’s wife, the character who does the most fucked up, soap opera-y things, is still a human whose actions make sense according to the character she is and the situation it is. It’s so easy to write JTV off as a bubbly fun parody/homage to the fucking-nuts world of telenovelas, a show that does a good job of having its pastel and comerselo, too. It is that, but it’s so much more. It’s proof how important it is to come out of the gate strong, confident, and with a story to tell as well as how much more impact a story can have if you actually give a shit. If this is the last battle in the tournament that JTV wins, it’s still an amazing story. It’s also getting scorched in the ratings, so if you people watching fucking Scorpion every week leave me with another Terriers on my hands, I’m not going to be happy.

 

After two-and-a-half months, we’re on to the finals people, where the first five episodes of Transparent will take on the first five episodes of Jane the Virgin. Good luck to both shows. The winner will be revealed on a special episode of the PopFilter podcast, so watch out for that on this website, or your iTunes feed.

 

COME BACK NOVEMBER 21ST, WHEN WE WRAP UP

THE TOURNAMENT AND REVEAL THE WINNER!!!

 

– Ryan Haley