The nourishing radicalism of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin

If you're looking for something healthy in a media landscape that sometimes feels poisonous, watch them

'Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.'
(Image credit: Greg Gayne/The CW)

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin returned last week, and not a moment too soon.

I'd like to say I'm writing about these shows right now, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which revealed the wretched conditions under which female artists work in Hollywood, because it's so important to examine shows about women, by women. But that framing, while true, is so horribly medicinal. It sounds dreary, like an obligation. So let me say this, which is less pat but more true: I've been waiting anxiously for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin to return because they're whip-smart, secret inversions of all the gender "scripts" and stereotypes and Hollywood archetypes that impoverish our media and our lives. They subvert pop culture's truisms about how abstract ideas like Man and Woman and Sex work. And — unlike shows like Westworld, which can sag under the weightiness of their ambition — they have fun doing it.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.