‘Jane the Virgin,’ funny and so much fun

When foreign TV shows are adapted for the American market, the creators usually do their best to hide anything that would suggest provenance. But sometimes the premise simply doesn’t work out of its original context.

The CW’s new comedy “Jane the Virgin” has such an absurd and implausible setup that the creators must have decided they need to flag its origins as a Spanish-language telenovela, thus signaling that we should expect melodrama full of improbable turns and coincidences.

Airing next Monday, Oct. 13, at 9 p.m., the first episode of “Jane the Virgin” delivers that, and then some, while maintaining a difficult balance: We have to care enough about the characters to keep watching, but if they get too real, the parody doesn’t work.

In other words, we have to be able to laugh at the action but not at the characters. The premiere not only pulls that off but makes us want to tune in next week.

In the premiere, Jane (Gina Rodriguez), a 23-year-old teaching student and waitress at a chic Miami hotel, is accidentally inseminated during a routine visit to the gynecologist. When she discovers she’s pregnant, her mother, Xiomara (Andrea Navedo), thinks it’s a miracle, because Jane’s deeply religious grandmother, Alba (Ivonne Coll), has persuaded Jane to remain a virgin.

Jane has to explain what happened to her boyfriend, Michael (Brett Dier), a police detective, who is understandably interested in what she plans to do about the pregnancy. In the first of many coincidences, the pregnancy also involves her in the troubled marriage of her young boss, Rafael (Justin Baldoni), and his scheming wife, Petra (Yael Grobglas).

The interconnections between the main characters soon become ridiculously tangled, as they often do in both telenovelas — the show is based on a Venezuelan telenovela called “Juana la Virgen” — and American soap operas. When we’ve just about had enough, a final twist links two more characters, and we see the words “To be continued.”

The creators make sure we know what they’re parodying by showing Jane and her grandmother watching telenovelas. At tense moments, Jane fantasizes that the star of one of them is talking to her.

The narrator even says, after the insemination, “Her life was now the stuff of telenovelas.”

Although the final twist makes us rethink our first impression of one character, the others are generally easy to read. They behave virtuously or villainously according to type.

That doesn’t give the actors much to do, but Gina Rodriguez is charming. She’s one of those actresses who keep us waiting for her to smile.

The narration is sometimes obtrusively arch. The use of on-screen graphics is overkill. At one point, we can read that Jane’s passions include “1. Her family. 2. God. 3. Grilled cheese sandwiches.”

It won’t be easy for the writers to keep tangling and untangling all the plot threads, but that’s their problem, not ours. We can sit back and enjoy the silliness while rooting for Jane to do the right thing and to find happiness.