‘Jane The Virgin’ Creator Jennie Snyder Urman: The Final Season 5 Is “Some Of Our Best Stuff Ever”

With the approach of the fifth and final season of The CW’s Jane the Virgin, creator and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman said fans can look forward to some of her best work and a satisfying ending.

“It’s some of our best stuff ever,” she said at Vulture Festival in Los Angeles on Sunday. “We’re very proud of the episodes.” The show is also going exactly as Snyder Urman always planned, and she’s embracing its approaching end with satisfaction. “I pitched the way it’s going to end when I pitched the show,” she said. “We’re on the path that was the story I felt like I wanted to tell, so it’s exciting, because we’re getting to that ending.”

Snyder Urman also said the final season of the show centered around the character of Jane Villanueva will likely air in March on Wednesday nights, and will run straight through, with no breaks.

Co-EP Valentina Garza added that the whole final season will be “so good. If you’re a fan of this show, you’re going to be delighted; you’re going to feel all the feels this year.”

“It’s going to be the Jane you love times ten,” co-producer Chantelle Wells said. “It’s going to be crazy, and you’re not going to want to miss a minute. It’s some of the best work that we’ve done on Jane the Virgin.”

Snyder Urman brought 50% of her writers’ room to the panel discussion, and five out of the six writers were female.

The team told moderator Jaime Camil, who plays Rogelio de la Vega in the show, that having a female-centric room had created a safe space, allowing everyone to be vulnerable, which led to a very realistic breast cancer storyline, actually based on the real-life experience of co-EP Valentina Garza.

“It’s a room where people can really express their vulnerabilities,” Garza said. “The fact that we have a very diverse, very female writing staff, means we can have very candid conversations about things like sex, which is a big part of our show, and how it affects female identity.”

Writer Rafael Agustin said his personal history as an undocumented student had made him “so proud” of the Alba Villaneuva (Ivonne Coll) storyline in which she deals with being undocumented, and that he saw the show’s story about “three powerful Latina women” as “uniquely American”, which is, he said, “in itself an act of resistance against this administration.”

Having a diverse writers’ room has also been absolutely vital in reflecting Jane’s experience as a Venezuelan-Mexican-American, Garza said. “As a viewer I felt really reflected in who I was, but the issue of Jane’s otherness was not central to her character…we don’t get fixated on culture in the way that some writers do when they’re trying to write about people from other cultures.”