Of course, viewers have declared otherwise.
And for good reason: It's an offensive show.
Jezebel recently gathered a group of Mexican-American women to discuss the show and most praised it with one going on about being tired of "White women" on TV. First off, Latinas can be White. The majority in the US, in fact, are. There are exceptions but if you're dealing with Latinas -- and that's much more in the country and in the world than just women who can trace their roots to Mexico -- most are aware that the race is White. The uninformed woman at Jezebel needs to learn the term "Anglo-White."
And Jezebel needs to learn how to stop being so damn xenophobic.
This is neither new nor unknown. It's so basic even Crapapedia can get it right:
Ethnicity: Hispanic or Latino origin
The question on Hispanic or Latino origin is separate from the question on race.[3][14] Hispanic and Latino Americans have ethnic origins in the Latin-speaking countries of Andorra, Latin America, and Spain. Most of the Latin American countries are, like the United States, racially diverse.[15] Consequently, no separate racial category exists for Hispanic and Latino Americans, as they do not constitute a race, nor a national group. When responding to the race question on the census form, each person is asked to choose from among the same racial categories as all Americans, and are included in the numbers reported for those races.[16]Each racial category may contain Non-Hispanic or Latino and Hispanic or Latino Americans. For example: the White (European-American) race category contains Non-Hispanic Whites and Hispanic Whites (see White Hispanic and Latino Americans); the Black or African-American category contains Non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanic Blacks (see Black Hispanic and Latino Americans); the Asian-American category contains Non-Hispanic Asians and Hispanic Asians (see Asian Hispanic and Latino Americans); and likewise for all the other categories. See the section on Hispanic and Latino Americans in this article.
Self-identifying as both Hispanic or Latino and not Hispanic or Latino is neither explicitly allowed nor explicitly prohibited.[2]
Get it?
According to [PDF format warning] the 2010 census results, 53% of Hispanic or Latinos in the US identify as White, 2.5% identify as Black or African-American, 1.4% as American Indian and Alaska Native, 0.4% as Asian, 0.1% as Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, 36.7% as Some Other Race, and 6.0% as Two or More Races. [All racially categories mentioned prior are the ones used by the Census.]
One of us is a Latina (Ava) who is damn tired of being assumed to being Mexican-American, when she is not and when Mexican-American women -- pay attention, Jezebel -- are not the only Latinas in the United States.
It's xenophobic and ignorant to present a five-person roundtable that does not include even one Latina who does not trace her roots to Mexico.
Leaving out Mexico, the number one region for Lations/as and Hispanics to trace their roots to is Central America, after that, it's the Caribbean (which includes Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico), then "All other Hispanic" and then South America.
So Jezebel gave you five self-identified Mexican-American women discussing a Puerto Rican woman -- the lead in Jane The Virgin, Gina Rodriguez, hails from Puerto Rico. Next up, a Haitian roundtable exploring the roots of slavery in the US during the 1800s!
Jane The Virgin has many problems including stereotypical portraits -- the gals of Jezzie felt the characters were deeper than stereotypes. Really? The Latino police office has . . . a criminal brother. Women -- especially older women -- are harpies. And let's not forget the ultimate insult outside of Jane, the cheesy announcer who all but yells "Ay, Papi!" every time he interrupts a scene.
He?
Yeah, the announcer is a man.
What else would the all knowing 'god' be on this show?
Jane is celebrated by The Water Cooler Set because she's the ultimate Madonna, the new Mary, pregnant without ever having had a sex. A virgin.
That's what critics are embracing, the virginity.
It's 'refreshing' to them when a woman is a virgin.
It's not realistic, that's for damn sure, but how they love it.
If you can't be a virgin on TV, at least be a sexless woman.
The Water Cooler Set will love you for it.
Look at Tea Leoni's Madam Secretary.
Tea's playing a faux woman, not a real one.
She's a little girl in Daddy's world.
We're supposed to find her hesitant manner in speaking charming and classy.
She's like a parade float of Greer Garson.
She's married to a professor so that the audience understands she's not the smartest in her own home. She's in a sexless marriage (you guarantee that by casting an actor who screams erectile dysfunction as her husband). And she uses her 'girl smarts' to get her way -- getting the (male) president's attention by going to his wife, getting the press' attention by getting a beauty make over.
She's a woman functioning in a man's world who's only female of note is her chief of staff that she's repeatedly in conflict with.
Tea should be embarrassed for playing the role.
She should be more embarrassed for being in the so-called TV show.
There has never been a show like it before and it's a sign of our trash culture that it exists now -- and is wrongly praised.
This is a 'political' show. It wants to 'enlighten' and 'educate' but it's from a creator who thinks the height of radical leftism is centrist Democrat Rahm Emanuel. It exists to, yet again, shift the political spectrum to the right in this country.
Tea considers herself a "good Democrat" so maybe she feels marching lockstep through this garbage is for the good of the party -- if not the country.
If so, she's desperately wrong.
Her show is far more damaging than anything Newt Gingrich could come up with.
The praise it's received, however, isn't at all surprising.
When you're a token woman using wiles to get your way and basically in your second virginity, The Water Cooler Set loves you.
But if you're not Greer Garson, if you show some of the backbone of Barbara Stanwyck?
Oh, how they hate you.
Katherine Heigl stars in State of Affairs which premiered Monday on NBC.
Unlike Tea's show, Katherine's new series is not a 'political' show trying to water down the left. Alfre Woodard plays the president and Heigel's a CIA analyst. The two women share love for a dead man (or maybe just 'dead') -- the president's son and the analyst's fiance.
Since his death, Charlie (Heigel) has been haunted by the death and by one part of it that she can't quite remember, a significant event in the death. She suppresses her grief with alcohol and casual sex.
Charlie's gusty and brave, treats women as her equals and doesn't back down in a confrontation with a man.
Barbara Stanwyck's spirit lives on and thank goodness for that.
Greer Garson is a "Who?" to young America and wasn't all that important in her own time.
She was the anti-Rosie The Riverter.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis both considered her an insufferable bore (onscreen and off) and for good reason.
It's also for good reason that unlike Crawford and Davis or Stanwyck, Garson couldn't go the distance.
By 1947, she was bombing at the box office, the following year she was second banana to Elizabeth Taylor and then the career was really over.
As Jeanine Basinger observes in The Star Machine:
If a female could last for a decade, she really paid off. If she could last for two decades, she was a phenomenal success. If she lasted longer than that, she was a miracle, and today we can call her a legend: Bette Davis, Myrna Loy, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Joan Crawford.
Greer Garson was the most minor MGM star to ever emerge. She demonstrated no fire or passion and she's largely forgotten today.
Tea should grasp that and be screaming her head off for better scripts and a stronger character.
But she's been lulled into the pretense that she has a hit (her show lives in a good neighborhood, one scheduling change and it tanks).
Heigl's playing a character people can identify with even as The Water Cooler Set sneers.
Her show also has a secret weapon in the recurring role of Nick: Chris McKenna.
If you look up his bio, you'll find he was on One Life To Live and blah blah blah.
Forget that.
He hit people's radar in 2013 due to a commercial -- one that had Kat and Rebecca raving about him and Rebecca even putting him at the top of her "10 most f**kable men of 2013."
Heigel's Charlie slept with Nick and it appears she did so while engaged to the president's dead son. You need someone sexy in the role of Nick to make it believable and Chris McKenna is one of the few men who can handle that task.
There are no political statements to be found in State of Affairs, it's trying to be a thriller and, largely, succeeding. By contrast, the hideous Madam Secretary wants to be so genteel and slightly one degree left of center that it's about as tasty as government cheese.
Another thing that leaves a hideous taste in your mouth? The Water Cooler Set's inability to champion active women, adult women and instead repeately latching onto pixies with moxie, overgrown Shirley Temple's who are more embarrassments than anything else.