The mere fact that ABC’s highest rated new show is called Ugly Betty spells progress for network television. It’s not hard to imagine a marketing executive shooting down the title by reasoning that any use of the word “ugly” would be enough to turn off viewers; in the audience-tested sitcom world of Friends and Will and Grace (whose names, come to think of it, sound like they were lifted from inspirational bumper stickers), even average people look ridiculously like airbrushed magazine models, perched high up in Manhattan lofts their real-world counterparts could never actually afford.
The title Ugly Betty implies the unpretentious, blunt human comedy that’s inherent in the show. America Ferrera’s homely Betty Suarez dreams of entering the elite New York magazine world, encumbered by small struggles – average struggles – like her overweight body and middle-class status. And as average struggles go, Ugly Betty’s aren’t life-changing. But that they’re recognized with such clarity, and made fun of so sympathetically, makes the show seem miraculously different.
“I hate telenovellas. I want to watch fashion TV,” says Justin, Betty’s effeminate younger brother. Ugly Betty is hyper aware of itself, both as an adaptation of a popular Colombian telenovella and as a comedy set in New York’s fashion industry. Like the Spanish soap operas that inspired it, Ugly Betty paints its story in broad, melodramatic strokes, not always meant to be taken seriously. The creators clearly relish in their predictable plots and bawdy humor. These tropes lack pretense, adopting a lowbrow answer to Betty’s serious dilemmas. Even in the dumbest scenarios, Ferrera translates her character’s crisis with absolute earnestness—her performance becomes the show’s endearing emotional core.
Though Ugly Betty is often about sex in the world of New York high fashion, it should be obvious how differently it conceives of relationships from Sex and the City’s shallow pillow talk. Sex here is never directly the issue, though it’s integral in every character’s life, even for those, like Betty, who clearly aren’t getting any. Betty learns that she was hired specifically so her promiscuous boss wouldn’t be tempted to sleep with her, a realization that forces characters to consider the pain their sexual motives can inflict.
Ugly Betty is not an ugly show. Actually, it’s a sexy show. But it evaluates people outside of a sexual context. It doesn’t do viewers the insult of injecting them with a sugar rush of New York life for the young and hot—a yuppie porn fantasy perpetuated by Hillary Duff and Sarah Jessica Parker. It’s no coincidence that, observing Betty and her group of scruffy seamstress friends, a co-worker observes that they are “a Bizarro Sex and the City.” The show itself is a subversion of Sex and the City’s callous objectification of everything Manhattan. It turns out life in New York, even in the office of a fashion magazine, is eerily like it is everywhere else: ugly.