This show came out in fall 2006 and ended(/was cancelled?) after 4 seasons. I heard many positive reviews on this show, and the actress who portrayed the eponymous Ugly Betty even won an Emmy for the role. But during its run I was only tepidly interested and only watched maybe a few accidental clips while flipping through to other channels. A week or so ago I went to watch TV to bore myself to sleep and an episode from the beginning of the first season was on and I thought, what the hey, I'll watch it. And I liked it.
Fast forward to now: I just finished watching the entire first season on Hulu. I'm kind of surprised that this show even made it to air; it deals with lots of Important Sociological Issues but in a very soapy, ABC hour-long comedy kind of way, with its slight fantasy-silly tone and caricatures of characters who you love to love and love to hate. Some of the issues that the show comments on (in more than one episode):
- first-generation Latino immigrant family
- issues with immigration laws/citizenship
- difficulty of being a single parent
- sexual harrassment
- difficulty of being a gay child
- gay/straight men passing as the other sexual identity to be accepted by certain people
- the ridiculous beauty standards set for women, and the efforts women make to become beautiful (incl. hair, makeup, fashion)
- alcoholism
- gender modification through surgery/transgender issues/gender identity
- sibling rivalry
- workplace relations/the work family
Okay, so a lot of these topics are ones that are often found it soap operas. Actually, this show was adapted from the Mexican soap opera Betty La Fea (Betty the Ugly), and a good deal of the episodes in the first half of this series featured a fake Spanish-language soap opera, complete with ridiculous plot twists and spontaneous make-out sessions between reformed pastors and the like. Ugly Betty works because it embraces the silliness and makes every character quirk comically enormous-- but adjusts the goofiness according to the seriousness of the situation. I'm not deeply invested in any of the characters beside Betty and I still find the show a bit more twee than the comedies I tend to enjoy, but I really like Betty and have to hand it to actors Becki Newton and Michael Urie for having great chemistry and comedic timing. I have the second season in my bag and can't wait to dig into it this weekend.
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