CW’s Jane the Virgin (2014), a Golden Globe-nominated, telenovela-inspired comedy now in its second season, tells the story of Jane Villanueva, a smart, ambitious young women whose life is upended by an accidental artificial insemination. The show’s first two seasons, in a nod to the series’ telenovela roots, have been incredibly dense in plot, jamming in a love triangle, multiple murders, a hunt for an international drug kingpin, graduate school, a birth, and more. While fast-paced plotting and constant twists and revelations contribute to the addictive, compulsively watchable quality of the show, Jane the Virgin’s most poignant and profound contribution to the current TV landscape is the way in which, in the center of its candy-colored hyperactivity and tightly-packed jokes, the show also manages to offer one of the most empathetic, delicately observed portraits of family’s power to both warp and nurture.

Jane the Virgin operates under the assumption that taking care of one’s family is an innate responsibility that can’t be shirked, no matter whether family members are deserving of one another’s self-sacrifice and no matter how misguided attempts at protecting family members may be. The family of Petra, the ex-wife of Jane’s baby-daddy, Rafael, is the most compact of the series, consisting only of Petra and her mother, Magda. Although the two are now living in luxury in Miami, flashbacks have provided glimpses into the characters’ earlier hardscrabble lives in post-Soviet Prague. The women are ruthless and often amoral - in this season alone, Petra has already impregnated herself with her ex-husband’s stolen sperm and her mother has murdered a henchman of Petra’s criminal current husband, Milos.

However, the series has demonstrated time and again, particularly through the women’s interactions with Milos, who scarred Magda with acid in Prague and tricked Petra into marriage in Miami to cover up an arms deal, their intense family loyalty is grounded in the urgent, ugly need for survival. As two women who survived financial hardship and violence, only to come to a new country where they have only each other for support, Petra and Magda demonstrate genuine love and family loyalty, even though it often manifests itself in brutal ways.

While Petra and Magda’s close-knit familial bond is a survival mechanism, the Solano family (comprised of Rafael, his sister Luisa, their step mother-cum-criminal mastermind Rose, and their father and absent mother) utilizes family in a utilitarian, Corleone-style pursuit of wealth and power. In this group, family members are kept around as long as they remain useful and are eliminated when they stand in the way of business. In the first season, Rafael’s father, owner of the Marbella hotel in which much of the show’s plot takes place, looms large as a never-approving paternal figure until he is suddenly and summarily murdered by his wife, Rose. Similarly, this season, it has emerged that Rafael and Luisa’s unseen mother is also a dangerous criminal, who operates under the on-the-nose alias “Mutter.”

While the younger generation of the Solano family longs for love and genuine familial bonds, the mindset of family as business arrangement is persistent. Rafael has fought throughout the series to establish a family with Jane and to be an active presence in his son’s life in a way that his father never was. In Season 2, Episode 6, however, the question of their son’s inheritance illuminates the ways in which Rafael thinks of care and expressions of love in primarily material ways. The following episode, Season 2, Episode 7, illustrates deeper levels of familial dysfunction by revealing that Rafael orchestrated the firing of Jane’s ex-boyfriend and his romantic rival, Michael, in order to ensure that Jane would choose him as her romantic partner.

While the series doesn’t shy away from depicting the way dogged devotion to family can bring out the worst in people, its ultimate focus is on the way families – even, and perhaps particularly, in their most unorthodox configurations – can be a source of support and love that nourishes the most moral, selfless aspects of individuals’ personalities. The basic concept of the show – the accidental pregnancy plot – has consistently served as a way of demonstrating the way the three generations of Villanueva women – grandmother, mother, and daughter – have set their own life plans aside to love and raise a child who came into their lives unexpectedly. While the women occasionally quarrel, their conversations on their porch or in their living room, usually in the evening, in which they open up about their sadness and fear and receive unwavering support from each other, occur so frequently that they might feel formulaic if they weren’t so emotionally truthful.

This love and loyalty and tendency to cultivate each other’s best qualities isn’t confined exclusively to the biologically-connected trio of women. While Rafael continues to struggle against the warped ideas of family with which he was raised, his proximity to the Villanueva family is the clear inspiration for the character’s gradual transformation from selfish bad boy to increasingly self-sacrificing father. More amusingly, Rogelio – a telenovela star and Jane’s biological father, whom she met for the first time during Season 1 – has grown throughout the series from an uproariously egotistical caricature of a self-involved actor to a loving father and husband who is capable of sacrificing his own pride for the sake of someone he loves (as when he appears on a rival’s show in a humiliating part to further his wife’s career in Season 2, Episode 7).

While Jane the Virgin pursues a staggering number of plotlines simultaneously, the show’s thematic and emotional core has remained consistent throughout the series. The series’ accidental pregnancy and organized crime plots are not simply wild, flashy hooks for viewers, but savvy points of entry to explore the variety of ways in which families shape individuals. In a demonstration of impressive narrative sophistication, the show acknowledges the ways in which family can be a destructive force that encourages tribal behavior. At heart, however, as the Villanueva family shows, this is a show that believes deeply in family as a nurturing haven, with the power to transform individuals into their best selves.