She's In Fashion
Salma Hayek, when opening the envelopes containing this year’s Oscar nominations (about which more anon) was heard to remark “There’s so many Mexicans!” with a little squeal of delight. She’s just one person who’s noticed a rise in creativity south of the border; the best film of 2006 and the best TV series both have roots in Mexico.
Of Alfonso Cuarón’s superb dystopian sci-fi/satire on immigration laws Children of Men, nothing needs to be recorded other than its exceptionality; one day, its absence from most major categories at the Academy Awards will be used as justification for a mass cull of Academy voters. On TV, the year’s American highlight has just arrived in the UK; it’s Ugly Betty.
Despite being based on a Colombian serial, Ugly Betty has a strong Mexican connection; it is produced by Hayek’s Ventarosa company, and each episode features a spoof Mexican soap opera called Vidas de Fuego. The Vidas de Fuego material is filmed in Mexico, and features cameos for those in the know from a variety of Mexican telenovela stars. Some explanation will be required for British readers; telenovelas are dramas (often melodramas) that are produced like soap operas but have the advantage of a predetermined beginning, middle and end - a bit like what the BBC tried to do with Bleak House, though even that series couldn’t match the popularity of the telenovelas in Latin American countries. The popular appetite for them is reminiscent of the heyday of The Morecambe & Wise Show in the UK, and they have serious export value; if you want to know how many countries watch them, think of every single country in the world bar Britain, and you’re pretty much there.
Resistance, frankly, is futile. Ugly Betty’s UK debut on Channel 4 brought in a strong 4.5 million viewers; it sits alongside Dispatches and The IT Crowd as one of the few reasons not to call in air strikes on that station. Because all this would be futile if it wasn’t for the fact that Ugly Betty is very, very, very good indeed.
In one way, it would be a mistake to praise Ugly Betty too much; it isn’t The World At War, it’s just a well-done comedy drama for Friday nights. It’s just that it’s done so damn well that it shows every other show working in the same area as being flat and lifeless. It does, at times, resemble Sex and the City and Will & Grace, but it lacks those certain elements that make you want to thump everyone involved with those programmes. And when compared with a big British drama production, it becomes horribly apparent what we’re doing wrong.
The storytelling in Ugly Betty is a miracle of clarity. Whereas the show seems to be a simple modern-day retelling of the ugly duckling myth, there’s an array of styles and storylines in it that would be bewildering if they weren’t handled with such confidence. Each of the three episodes broadcast in the UK has included elements of farce, camp comedy, social realism, conspiracy thriller, gothic horror, romance and parody, somehow coexisting without diminishing each other. As well as this, the viewer is expected to remember the various fake television programmes that the characters watch (and are sometimes conduits for exposition), and tiny little grace notes like Betty’s father Ignacio’s continued trouble with his HMO add to the sense of a fully-imagined world, one that’s sometimes the same as ours, but is sometimes deeply surreal.
Compare this to a current British drama like Five Days or The Ruby in the Smoke, where characters are introduced doing and saying nothing even remotely memorable. By the time the plots in these series kick in, you’ve already forgotten who everyone is, and frankly you don’t care. There’s never so much as a second of Ugly Betty where something unmemorable is happening. It doesn’t all work - the second episode saw the murder-conspiracy plot featured a little too heavily, overshadowing the other elements of the plot with its darkness, and I am on the fence about Wilhemina’s camp assistant Marc St. James - but there’s enough in each episode to compensate for the odd misfire.
The show is more than just a quick, imaginative entertainment for two reasons. The first is America Ferrera, a fantastically talented actress whose breakthrough came in the indie picture Real Women Have Curves. I’d sort of resigned myself to not seeing her again; partly because movies and shows aimed at a Latino audience don’t generally travel across the Atlantic, and partly because there just aren’t many roles out there for slightly chubby Honduran actresses. (Shame on self-described “feminist” director Catherine Hardwicke, incidentally, for giving her such a piffling little role in her boring skater drama Lords of Dogtown)
Betty Suarez, thankfully, is the role of a lifetime. She is naïve but by no means stupid, meek but not spineless (the moment in the third episode where she threatened to cold-clock Marc was a keeper, and believable in character terms too). Her awkward laugh and instinctive, defensive burying of her head in her shoulders is a wonderful observation; it makes you realise how many girls like this you know, and how infrequently you see them on television.
That last paragraph hints at the other reason why this show works. In a time when it seems to have been universally agreed at a meeting of Cunts and Dickheads of the World that television should go out of its way to bully and humiliate the lower orders, Ugly Betty is a genuinely warm-hearted show. It’s hard to parody the fashion industry, since most of its products already look like some sort of self-hating auto-parody, and Ugly Betty wisely stays away from too many jokes about aestheticising other people’s misery. But, in its juxtaposition of the indecently wealthy Meade family of media barons with the Suarez family’s stressed-out breadline existence, it subtly makes a connection between the standard ‘bitchiness’ and ‘extravagance’ we’re led to expect from the fashion industry and real, not-fun kinds of cruelty such as class prejudice and racism. Likewise, the attitude shown towards Betty by her fellow employees (with the exception of Ashley Jensen - acquitting herself surprisingly well now she’s playing a character, rather than a series of ill-defined plot points for Ricky Gervais) is a upsettingly convincing portrayal of workplace bullying.
It makes you want Betty to win (if America’s performance hasn’t done that already) and it makes you not mind that it seems to be a part of the show’s formula that Betty always gets proven right. You may dismiss Ugly Betty as a load of vacuous girly tosh, but it’s tosh done well. It’s certainly not half-arsed, and to my eyes it makes everything else on television seem half-baked and sloppy.
Of Alfonso Cuarón’s superb dystopian sci-fi/satire on immigration laws Children of Men, nothing needs to be recorded other than its exceptionality; one day, its absence from most major categories at the Academy Awards will be used as justification for a mass cull of Academy voters. On TV, the year’s American highlight has just arrived in the UK; it’s Ugly Betty.
Despite being based on a Colombian serial, Ugly Betty has a strong Mexican connection; it is produced by Hayek’s Ventarosa company, and each episode features a spoof Mexican soap opera called Vidas de Fuego. The Vidas de Fuego material is filmed in Mexico, and features cameos for those in the know from a variety of Mexican telenovela stars. Some explanation will be required for British readers; telenovelas are dramas (often melodramas) that are produced like soap operas but have the advantage of a predetermined beginning, middle and end - a bit like what the BBC tried to do with Bleak House, though even that series couldn’t match the popularity of the telenovelas in Latin American countries. The popular appetite for them is reminiscent of the heyday of The Morecambe & Wise Show in the UK, and they have serious export value; if you want to know how many countries watch them, think of every single country in the world bar Britain, and you’re pretty much there.
Resistance, frankly, is futile. Ugly Betty’s UK debut on Channel 4 brought in a strong 4.5 million viewers; it sits alongside Dispatches and The IT Crowd as one of the few reasons not to call in air strikes on that station. Because all this would be futile if it wasn’t for the fact that Ugly Betty is very, very, very good indeed.
In one way, it would be a mistake to praise Ugly Betty too much; it isn’t The World At War, it’s just a well-done comedy drama for Friday nights. It’s just that it’s done so damn well that it shows every other show working in the same area as being flat and lifeless. It does, at times, resemble Sex and the City and Will & Grace, but it lacks those certain elements that make you want to thump everyone involved with those programmes. And when compared with a big British drama production, it becomes horribly apparent what we’re doing wrong.
The storytelling in Ugly Betty is a miracle of clarity. Whereas the show seems to be a simple modern-day retelling of the ugly duckling myth, there’s an array of styles and storylines in it that would be bewildering if they weren’t handled with such confidence. Each of the three episodes broadcast in the UK has included elements of farce, camp comedy, social realism, conspiracy thriller, gothic horror, romance and parody, somehow coexisting without diminishing each other. As well as this, the viewer is expected to remember the various fake television programmes that the characters watch (and are sometimes conduits for exposition), and tiny little grace notes like Betty’s father Ignacio’s continued trouble with his HMO add to the sense of a fully-imagined world, one that’s sometimes the same as ours, but is sometimes deeply surreal.
Compare this to a current British drama like Five Days or The Ruby in the Smoke, where characters are introduced doing and saying nothing even remotely memorable. By the time the plots in these series kick in, you’ve already forgotten who everyone is, and frankly you don’t care. There’s never so much as a second of Ugly Betty where something unmemorable is happening. It doesn’t all work - the second episode saw the murder-conspiracy plot featured a little too heavily, overshadowing the other elements of the plot with its darkness, and I am on the fence about Wilhemina’s camp assistant Marc St. James - but there’s enough in each episode to compensate for the odd misfire.
The show is more than just a quick, imaginative entertainment for two reasons. The first is America Ferrera, a fantastically talented actress whose breakthrough came in the indie picture Real Women Have Curves. I’d sort of resigned myself to not seeing her again; partly because movies and shows aimed at a Latino audience don’t generally travel across the Atlantic, and partly because there just aren’t many roles out there for slightly chubby Honduran actresses. (Shame on self-described “feminist” director Catherine Hardwicke, incidentally, for giving her such a piffling little role in her boring skater drama Lords of Dogtown)
Betty Suarez, thankfully, is the role of a lifetime. She is naïve but by no means stupid, meek but not spineless (the moment in the third episode where she threatened to cold-clock Marc was a keeper, and believable in character terms too). Her awkward laugh and instinctive, defensive burying of her head in her shoulders is a wonderful observation; it makes you realise how many girls like this you know, and how infrequently you see them on television.
That last paragraph hints at the other reason why this show works. In a time when it seems to have been universally agreed at a meeting of Cunts and Dickheads of the World that television should go out of its way to bully and humiliate the lower orders, Ugly Betty is a genuinely warm-hearted show. It’s hard to parody the fashion industry, since most of its products already look like some sort of self-hating auto-parody, and Ugly Betty wisely stays away from too many jokes about aestheticising other people’s misery. But, in its juxtaposition of the indecently wealthy Meade family of media barons with the Suarez family’s stressed-out breadline existence, it subtly makes a connection between the standard ‘bitchiness’ and ‘extravagance’ we’re led to expect from the fashion industry and real, not-fun kinds of cruelty such as class prejudice and racism. Likewise, the attitude shown towards Betty by her fellow employees (with the exception of Ashley Jensen - acquitting herself surprisingly well now she’s playing a character, rather than a series of ill-defined plot points for Ricky Gervais) is a upsettingly convincing portrayal of workplace bullying.
It makes you want Betty to win (if America’s performance hasn’t done that already) and it makes you not mind that it seems to be a part of the show’s formula that Betty always gets proven right. You may dismiss Ugly Betty as a load of vacuous girly tosh, but it’s tosh done well. It’s certainly not half-arsed, and to my eyes it makes everything else on television seem half-baked and sloppy.