Ugly Betty | ABC WHEN Thursday, 7 PM WHERE Channel Seven
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The Trib reviewer, Maureen Ryan, thinks Ugly Betty is subversive because the heroine is “a curvy Hispanic woman with thick eyebrows.” Ryan calls this “stunning.” If that’s all it takes to stun her, she must be walking around in a perpetual state of shell shock. The Salon reviewer, Rebecca Traister, thinks that Ugly Betty is subversive because of “its smart take on cultural and economic differences,” which makes it part of “the very narrow pantheon of television that has explored what it’s like not to be rich and/or white in America.” Yeah, I can’t think of any other show like that–except My Name Is Earl . . . or Girlfriends . . . or Prison Break . . . or Hill Street Blues or the Jeffersons or the Honeymooners–my God, even The Flintstones was about the working class.
The truth is that Ugly Betty is a wholly routine piece of TV, notable mainly for the depth of its creative cowardice. Let’s start with the title: you’d think this would require a lead actress who is–no way to be tactful here–ugly. But the show doesn’t have the nerve. Instead they’ve cast a perfectly attractive woman named America Ferrara and stuck her with nerd glasses and a gross set of braces. OK, that makes her hard to take in extreme goggle-eyed close-up shots, of which there are many, but so what? She’s still a nice-looking person in clown drag. So then the show tries to goose the pretense that she’s homely by bringing in executive producer Salma Hayek as a special guest star. But this just comes off as unsportsmanlike. It’s like doing a show called “Dumb Jock” and bringing in special guest star Stephen Hawking. And having Hayek strutting around the set says “Don’t worry–we were never that serious about the ugly thing. We’re all about the eye candy.”
In every episode there are scenes where Betty is shown arguing with the HMO or trying to save her illegal-immigrant father from being deported–you know, because she’s a real person dealing with real problems, the way they do in Queens. She even has a moment of self-empowering assertiveness where she denounces her boss for not knowing how hard life is for real people like her. It’s all very right-on–except, of course, that Betty’s got no idea how hard life is for her boss. He’s got a ghostly woman in some sort of secret high-tech cosmetic surgery research institute sending him quasi-occult messages hinting that his father is a murderer. I think he’d give his right arm to spend a day on hold with an HMO.
