The second episode of Jane the Virgin (on Monday, Oct. 20) was as well-written as the first.  This CW series is the new Desperate Housewives—i.e. the new plebeian, seriocomic soap—but so far it’s better than Housewives.  It’s livelier and more amusing and, well, somehow a little less plebeian.  Too, it’s moving (in the second episode), notwithstanding the gimmicky tear falling in slow-mo from the eye of Yael Grobglas’s Petra.

Gina Rodriguez is appealingly fine as Jane, resourceful and not as conventional as she could be.  Yara Martinez also impresses as a doctor named Luisa, strikingly subdued in pain and fear.  Among the men, Jaime Camil never overdoes his comic vigor as a telenovela star.

The ratings for Jane have been decent.  Let’s hope the show remains decent.

Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (1952) is a rugged, natural beauty-loving Western, but much about the narrative doesn’t hold up.

Surely a pack of hostile men would not ride their horses into an unoccupied area with a burning campfire and thus risk an ambush from their enemies.  Surely Jimmy Stewart’s cowboy would refuse the further services of scalawags who try to overturn his plans to deliver food to a settlement.  And a few other befuddling things go on as well.  Adapting someone’s novel, scenarist Borden Deal should have known better:  The plotting makes this movie impure in a way that a Western flick like Shane is not.

Bend is a rich movie, yes, but that’s only owing to what the director, Mann, has done.

Cover of Bend of the River

So far we’re waiting for the maturation of such villains as the Penguin and Catwoman and of Bruce Wayne’s Batman (if indeed it takes place) in the new Fox TV series, Gotham (on Monday nights), but in the meantime there is no mere modicum of criminal activity in depraved Gotham City.  All the perniciousness gives police detective Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie) a run for his money, forcing him to consort with future costumed personages.  He makes a promise to young Wayne, for example, that he will find his parents’ killer.

The sleaziness of the police force, etc. is a stale element in Gotham, and yet the show tries hard not to be boring.  It can be hard-nosed fun if also a bit raffish, and there is first-rate acting from Donal Logue and Robin Lord Taylor (as the future Penguin).  Some of the female thespians could be stronger.

Selina Kyle’s first appearance as The Cat in Batman #1 (Spring 1940). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)