It’s a good thing Betty Suarez’s poncho is roomy.
Under that billowing bright-red garment, which she wore in the first episode of ABC’s “Ugly Betty,” Suarez sneaked in the tools of a television revolution.
The success of the Thursday night show, one of the few real hits of the new season, has upended as many rules of television as you care to count.
It’s not just that a curvy Hispanic woman with thick eyebrows is starring in a broadcast network hit, though that is stunning. But this is a season of surprising developments. After all, the only other recent breakout character is not from one of the glossy, expensive star vehicles that debuted in the last few months.
No, the other standout character of the fall season is a nerdy Japanese “Star Trek” fan, the lovably geeky Hiro of “Heroes.” Could it be that networks are stepping outside their comfort zones of cops, lawyers and docs and may be on the verge of offering us fun, quirky, just plain different characters? Let’s hope so.
Even if that doesn’t happen, the success of “Ugly Betty” is heartening, not just because the show is a touching dramedy with a starmaking performance by America Ferrera at its center. It’s also a thrill because the show is chock-full of things that just aren’t done on TV — or usually aren’t done well.
Until Betty and her un-chic “Guadalajara” poncho swooped into the snooty offices of Meade Publishing, we rarely, if ever, saw clashes of class and culture like the one we’re seeing now between the highest echelons of Manhattan society and this lower-middle class resident of Queens — a clash in which, by the way, neither side is necessarily held up as the gold standard.
We rarely saw a chick-friendly aspirational drama in which the prize is not a guy, but respect in the workplace. And how many family dramas do we see in which characters struggle to afford their medication and talk about immigration issues that affect them directly?
“Whether it’s the Cinderella myth or the Ugly Duckling — that’s the quick way people are summing up the story, but if you watch, you realize that’s not it at all,” says Eric Mabius, who plays Betty’s boss, Mode magazine editor Daniel Meade. “Betty is redefining the entire paradigm on her terms.”
Here’s the biggest rule that “Betty” didn’t follow, to the show’s eternal credit: The show, which follows the story of Betty’s unlikely stint as the assistant to a publishing scion, didn’t try to strip away the many complicated layers that make it a delectable, unique concoction.
Usually network executives appear to have one job: To bland-ify a show so that it offends no one. The thinking is, if you remove the elements that might turn off individual constituencies, you widen a program’s potential appeal. What you usually end up with is a big bunch of non-threatening blah.
Multilayered
But “Betty” went in the other direction, stacking up layers, colors and tones, and mixing comedy, camp and drama with a devil-may-care brashness.
The show is a veritable pinata full of treats: If you don’t like the family saga, you can enjoy the forays into the catty fashion world; if you don’t like the antics of the haute couture divas, there’s a soapy murder mystery to solve; and if you’re not into that aspect of the show, there are not one but two romances brewing for Betty.
There’s also the endlessly relatable idea of the outsider persevering in the face of snubs and obstacles. Who hasn’t felt like Betty?
Vanessa Williams says her four kids, who range from college age to 6 years old, all love the show — they actually persuaded the actress to continue in the role as diva fashion editor Wilhemina Slater when she thought about dropping out after filming the pilot in New York, which is where her family lives (the show is now shot in L.A.). “They said, `Mom, this is a great role. You’ll have fun. We’ll be fine,'” Williams said.
“My eldest is actually at [the Fashion Institute of Technology] in New York; she loves the idea of it being set in the fashion world. My 6-year-old loves how I get to behave on the show — yelling, throwing things,” Williams says with a laugh.
And that cross-generational appeal has paid off with the 14.2 million viewers who have been tuning in each week. As Michael Urie, who plays Betty’s fellow assistant Marc, puts it, “There’s Queens and there’s Manhattan, and we’ve found our audience in both places.”
Part of the reason that “Ugly Betty’s” audacious mixture isn’t a disaster is because Silvio Horta, the executive producer who adapted “Betty” from the hit Colombian telenovela “Yo Soy Betty, la Fea” (“I Am Betty, the Ugly”), knows what he’s writing about. He was once a sheltered Hispanic kid in Miami whose relatives couldn’t believe he wanted to go to college in New York City.
Beyond comfort zone
“Any family member [I talked to], it was like, `You’re leaving? You’re going away? You’re going to New York? That’s so far. It’s crazy, you don’t need to leave!'” Horta recalls. “None of my cousins [left], you sort of stay behind and stay close. To move beyond that, you know — it’s different for Betty, it’s different than anybody else around her [at Mode]. There’s a real conflict and a real struggle for her.”
Betty’s conflict, between the gum-snapping, big-haired world of Queens and the often snobby world of Manhattan publishing, is one that Horta could relate to from the start.
“I love the idea of doing a first-generation Latino-American story, which is sort of my experience, in trying to balance these two very different worlds,” Horta says. “And to get a real sense of this family, which is so different than this world in which she aspires to succeed, [a world] in which she so does not fit in, but by virtue of her optimism and intelligence and confidence, she is able to not only succeed but is able to effect change in others.”
Indeed, part of the show’s charm is its subversive role-reversals, which even apply to its title, which some critics dubbed controversial. Of course Betty is not ugly — perhaps just in need of a day at the spa. And as it happens, her upstanding moral code makes her appealing — she’s much more attractive than the supposedly elite types around her, who recognize on some level that she is their superior, if not as a trendsetter, then as a human being.
“She’s teaching me to regard people with sensitivity and humanity and to regard people with a consideration I was never taught growing up, and I’m teaching her how to navigate this adult world,” says Mabius of Daniel and Betty’s odd-couple relationship. “It’s like together we make a whole person.”
“Audiences really love that me and [Wilhemina], we’re always plotting and trying to be mean, and we end up screwing it up,” Urie says. “And as much as we hate that Betty is all those things that she is, she’s always right.”
Taking the gamble
But taking on a show like this — in which class, ethnicity and gender issues collide in a campily fabulous fashion-magazine world — was a leap of faith by ABC. On the plus side, “Ugly Betty” was a known quantity, and versions of the show were raging successes in TV markets all over the world.
“Every time the original [telenovela] was on, my mom would hurry and get off the phone,” Horta recalls. “And whenever I was home it was just on. It was sort of this sensation.”
But it was difficult to get an American version of the show, which originally ran from 1999-2001 in Colombia, off the ground. The concept bounced around in the American TV-development world for years: NBC tried to make it as a half-hour comedy, and even ABC tried to make it once before but passed on that version.
Still, the creative team behind the show, which includes Ben Silverman, who successfully imported the British comedy “The Office,” and Salma Hayek, who’s currently appearing as a guest star on the show, never backed off Betty’s ethnicity or working-class roots.
“We really wanted to bring back to television . . . through emotion, through character, through comedy, conversations about race, about class, about differences and distinctions within our everyday life, and . . . to potentially bring Norman Lear back to a soap opera,” Silverman said at the Television Critics Association press tour in July.
Like many Hispanics, Ana Ortiz, who plays Betty’s older sister Hilda, has been waiting for American television to start depicting people from her world — as more than maids and man-stealers, the kind of roles for which she has most often auditioned.
“And can I tell you — [it’s always] a maid named Maria,” she says with a rueful laugh. “They haven’t even gotten to the point where they can expand at least on the name. If I’m going to be a maid, can she at least be Blanca or Julia?”
In that context, the arrival of the script for “Ugly Betty” was an event.
“I remember when I first read the script, and I thought, `Oh, my God, this is us. This is my family,’ ” says Ortiz, who comes from a tight-knit Irish-Puerto Rican family in New York. “Everybody’s in each other’s business in my family all the time. They want you to be independent and want you to grow up, but they are so super-protective at the same time.”
“To me, Betty is the most beautiful opportunity that’s ever come across my path to represent a whole generation of young women who don’t recognize themselves in anything they’re watching,” Ferrera told critics at TCA. “Whether it be magazines or TV or movies, they’re invisible.”
And Horta was determined that Betty’s family–which consists of Hilda, Hilda’s fashion-obsessed son, Justin, and her illegal immigrant father–play a prominent role in the show. It was a wise decision; as with New Jersey’s Italian-American Sopranos family and the African-American clan on “Everybody Hates Chris,” the Suarezes are both rooted in their ethnicity and transcend it at the same time.
People relate “not because it’s a Hispanic family, it’s because it’s a family with problems,” Williams says. “You relate to the plight of these characters.”
That mixture of heartfelt drama and sly comedy has helped set “Betty” apart, and its close attention to Betty’s emotional journey made the show a perfect fit with ABC’s Thursday hit “Grey’s Anatomy.” Still, would “Betty” have become such a topic of water-cooler conversation without its candy-colored palette and the vibrant aesthetic touches that announce, “This is not your father’s procedural”?
“I would always say it’s [Pedro] Almodovar-esque, in that there’s a bit of heightened reality, but a real sort of grounded, emotional factor there,” Horta says of “Betty’s” distinctive look, which is dominated by the orange-and-white Mode offices, the primary colors of Betty’s sometimes outlandish outfits and the clashing patterns of the Suarezes’ Queens home.
One thing Horta says you won’t see on “Ugly Betty” is the shaky, hand-held camera that “24” helped popularize. And unlike much television fare, “Betty” is brightly lit. Just as Betty doesn’t match the body type and ethnicity of most female TV characters, “Ugly Betty” looks like nothing else on TV.
Simple touches
“It’s about the framing of the shots, the angles and these simple touches,” Horta says. “Everything is a bit askew, which gives it that heightened edge. We just wanted it to have a real pop to it.”
And pop it has. “Betty,” along with another left-field show, “Heroes,” is one of the few new series to truly catch on with viewers. “Ugly Betty” is not only drawing solid ratings — against formidable fare such as “The Office” and “Survivor” — but it’s also been the inspiration for a fertile crop of blogs and Web sites.
Still, “Betty’s” hit status means that the show has gone into overdrive to ensure new episodes stay in the pipeline. And given its heightened visual style and large cast, it’s a complicated show to make.
“It’s really rare to facilitate so many different story lines and people from such different backgrounds all in one show. It’s a huge undertaking,” Mabius says. “I’m looking at a script right now — they cut this episode down, but as it exists, there are 57 pages and 60 scenes. And we have eight days to shoot 60 scenes. . . . It’s intense.”
“We haven’t had a break at all since we started,” Williams says. “We’ve been doing dual episodes on the same stages, many times we’re shooting with two different directors at the same time. Poor America, she’s like, `What episode is it?'”
The cast may be exhausted, but so far this viewer is energized by “Ugly Betty’s” potential. It has found ways to show us new facets of these characters without diminishing their ability to be funny, catty or warm. And as “Ugly Betty” goes forward, Horta promises more unpredictable story lines for the fearless, fashion-challenged young woman from Queens.
“These things that happen in the earlier episodes, they’re simple, in a way,” Horta says. “Betty has a heart of gold and she is the voice of reason. But as things become more complex and you’re dealing with shades of gray, what does a person do?”
All things considered, despite her heart of gold, I don’t know what Betty would do.
And that’s a beautiful thing.
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`Betty’ translated into versions around the world
When the telenovela “Yo Soy Betty, La Fea” first aired in Colombia from 1999 to 2001, it caused a sensation. And the show was must-see viewing in the Hispanic community when it was imported to the U.S. via Telemundo during the 2000-2001 TV season.
Like “Ugly Betty,” “Betty La Fea” had an unlikely character at its center — a plain girl of sterling moral character working with fashionable and jaded urbanites. But there were important differences between the first Betty and the American version that debuted this fall.
For one thing, most telenovelas air every weeknight and have a fixed end date in sight, even before they begin. ABC toyed with the idea of making the show a nightly serial before eventually adopting the weekly one-hour format.
“It was really interesting to look at the packet of original telenovela stories and to read through them,” James Parriott, one of the show’s executive producers, said at the Television Critics Association press tour in July. “And we didn’t use them actually at all, but it was roughly the equivalent of one week — five of their episodes felt like about an episode of our television.”
And in the Colombian version, Betty didn’t work at a magazine, she worked at a cutthroat fashion house.
“It was interesting in Colombia; the original Betty, part of the success and part of the intent of the original author [was Betty as] this moral center in an immoral world,” Parriott said. “Colombia and Bogota at that time, because of the drug trade and everything, was a very corrupt society. And Betty, as a character in that society, was this morally pure center.”
However the original series ended up with Betty becoming romantically involved with her boss, a possibility that Eric Mabius, who plays Betty’s boss, Daniel Meade, thinks is a bad idea for the American version.
“That’s the greatest way to kill a show,” Mabius said. “I think inevitably, in the workplace when you are fired up and you have intense situations, you feel closer to someone, so automatically the mind ends up going to that place, I don’t know why. I can see a knee-jerk reaction [like that]. A lot of the fan sites, after the first episodes, they’re like, `Oh, yeah, they’re going to hook up within four episodes.’ In the original series, that was the death of the series.”
Since the Colombian original debuted, the “Betty” concept has been exported worldwide: There have been, or will be, versions of “Betty” in India, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Mexico and Israel, among other countries. In the end, 70 versions of “Betty” will grace TV screens around the world.
The version from Mexico, “La Fea Mas Bella” (“The Most Beautiful Ugly Woman”) is airing on Univision in the United States. The lead character is Lety, a shy, plain young woman who has trouble finding a good job, despite her prestigious degree, until she is hired by the media firm Conceptos. How’s the show doing? Well, one recent Monday, “La Fea Mas Bella” got better ratings than the CW’s offerings in the 7 p.m. time slot.
The German version, “Verliebt in Berlin” (“In Love in Berlin”) was a runaway hit; its original run was extended, and the show was dubbed for broadcast in Hungary and France. The star of the show wore a fat suit to convey the lead character’s lack of glamor, and the series played down the humorous side of her adventures.
In the original Colombian version, when it appeared Betty might accept a bribe from a corrupt fabric supplier, a front-page newspaper urged the TV character to stick to her morals. She did.
Producers in Spain came up with yet another Spanish-language version of the show, “Yo Soy Bea.”
In India, the name of the show was “There’s No One Like Jassi,” and it was “an instant smash,” according to the Indo-Asian news service.
There were complaints in various countries, including Russia, where the show was called “Born Ugly,” that the show caused a downturn in bar business. Russian broadcasters actually dragged their feet when it came to creating a local version of the show — until producers found two Russian-speaking Colombians to serve as creative consultants.
According to one news report, when crowds protesting the Vieques installation in Puerto Rico began to thin out, the organizers showed “Betty La Fea” on a giant screen.
A version is being considered for Britain; that Betty would be, one TV type speculated to the London Sunday Times, “maybe an old-fashioned librarian crossed with a female vicar, certainly with bad teeth.”
— Maureen Ryan
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moryan@tribune.com
