There’s a special effect, regularly deployed on The CW’s Jane the Virgin. When the titular Jane, pregnant with her former crush and current boss’s child via telenovelesque contrivance and engaged to someone else, finds herself warming to said boss, when he is particularly kind or thoughtful or says just the right thing, an orangey glow emanates from her chest. It goes largely unremarked, even by the show’s omniscient narrator, sometimes it’s not even fully on screen, just a fuzzy brightness at the bottom of the frame, but it’s there to remind us that Jane’s heart is important, that it beats at the center of the series.

The quick-moving plots of Jane the Virgin are the hallmark of telenovelas like the one that inspired the series (Venezuela’s Juana la Virgen), and the stylized sets, decorated in pastel blues and greens, are meant to evoke both those telenovelas and the show’s Miami setting, to add an element of theater to the series, pulling it just a bit out of reality, but the story of an accidentally artificially inseminated virgin works because the characters that inhabit it behave like real people, even in an unreal situation.

From charming central-character Jane (Gina Rodriguez), to her love interests, reformed bad boy boss Rafael (Justin Baldoni) and extra-reformed bad boy fiancé Michael (Brett Dier), to her family, her wild mother Xiomara (Andrea Navedo), religious grandmother Alba (Ivonne Coll) and dopey telenovela star father Rogelio (Jaime Camil), and even to the closest thing the show has to a villain, Rafael’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Petra (Yael Grobglas), the characters on Jane the Virgin feel whole, not just like archetypes.

Petra cons and plots against Rafael because she’s under the thumb of her conniving mother, as well as a mystery villain the audience has yet to meet. Michael keeps secrets about Petra’s affair from Jane because he knows it will affect her decisions about what to do with the baby, and he’s not sure he wants to raise another man’s kid. Rafael is rude to Michael because he sees him as competition for his child’s, not to mention Jane’s, heart. Xiomara hides the identity of Jane’s father because she doesn’t want to pile onto the complications in Jane’s life, or to lose her place in it.

Even Rogelio, easily the show’s most cartoonish character, kind of dumb and absolutely self-absorbed, is motivated by genuine human emotions. Whether he’s putting on an elaborate show for his first dinner with newly discovered daughter Jane, or gifting her with a car without obvious reason, his actions are prompted by a desire to make up for missing the first 23 years of her life, and by the urge to provide something so big for Jane when he couldn’t even buy a car for himself until he was 35.

And Jane. Jane weighs the pros and cons of having an abortion in the series’ pilot because it’s 2014 and she has a young mother and she has worked her whole life to avoid becoming one. She decides to be a part of the baby’s life after Rafael and Petra split because she wants to offer it the stability that was lacking in her own childhood. She values honesty because she knows the pain that accompanies dishonesty. Jane is practical and selfless to a fault, but her heart doesn’t need to literally glow to be clear to the audience, it’s present in her every action.

As Jane the Virgin catapults itself through story (and boy does it, only six episodes in and several secrets have spilled, someone’s been murdered, two couples have split up, four different characters have committed to raising the baby Jane’s carrying, in three different configurations of family units, and there was a big kiss­) it succeeds by tethering itself to recognizable human emotions. It gets away with a pretzel-twisted plot and swooning set pieces like the one that ended the most recent episode, “Chapter Six,” because the characters behave logically within their illogical lives.

And that’s where Jane’s glowing heart fits into this. When that special effect lights up the screen it’s a reminder that, while Jane the Virgin isn’t quite the real world, where the visual cues to someone’s emotions are a bit more nuanced, human logic is at work in the storytelling. If it can keep an eye on that heart, the audience has every reason to believe the show can sustain itself.