TV Anti-Rant: Ugly Betty - So Good It's Good

Betty Suarez doesn’t care what you think. She goes to the office in Guadalajaran ponchos you wouldn’t want to get caught cleaning your car with, and she works at Mode—televisual equivalent of Vogue. She’s badass in the orthodontic sense of the word. Piss her off and she’ll blind you with her mouth metal. Piss her off at night and she’ll bust her retainer on your ass. Try—that’s right, I dare you, just try—to group this deglamorized diva and her cronies with Camp Desperate Housewives’s soap-opera-while-we-wink brand of comedy and I’ll force you to relive the worst moment in Betty’s life: watching Joey Lawrence get kicked off Dancing With the Stars. Betty wouldn’t condone it, though—she’s so good she wouldn’t inflict reality-TV-induced pain on you even if you were misinterpreting her show.

On Ugly Betty you can be good and ugly, or bad and ugly, but you can’t be good and bad. Ugly Betty exploits the melodramatic aesthetic of the telenovela: everyone is either good or evil, and without one the other wouldn’t exist. That doesn’t mean the villains and villainesses on Ugly Betty are people you love to hate. We love to love witchy Wilhelmina Slater, her flying-monkey assistant Marc, and her raised eyebrow. Yet we also love Betty, her SoCuteItsSick.com screensavers, and her bushy eyebrows. Looking down on the brainy anti-beauty as if she’s a fallen Dancing With the Stars contestant, we feel bad while remaining proud. She’s our Queens homegirl living out her big dreams in Manhattan. The only character we do not totally love? Daniel Meade and his fluctuating ethics. He defies the telenovela distinction between right and wrong, demonstrating that the good, the bad, and the ugly may not be so different.

Telenovelas aren’t like their American daytime counterparts. Where our soaps try to achieve dramatic credibility, which is impossible given their intrinsic time and budget constraints, telenovelas shun pretense. People describe them as over-the-top, but they’re really down-to-earth. Call them trash and they won’t care: Telenovelas know what they are and don’t need to play dress-up. If Desperate Housewives satirizes the American soap opera, Ugly Betty does just the opposite with the telenovela. It sets an already unembarrassed form free.

How do you liberate television’s freest form? Cast Rebecca Romijn as Alexis, Daniel Meade’s post-op transsexual brother, put her in a car accident, give her amnesia, leave her running around the office squeezing her chest as she wonders why she’s got breasts, and do it all with a straight face. Or throw Judith Light, as boozy murderer Claire Meade, in jail with crotchety cellmate Yoga, watch her escape, give her a rifle, leave her alone in a room with Vanessa Williams, and enjoy, because that’s all there is to do. There’s nothing hiding behind Ugly Betty’s ridiculousness. All that matters is speed and quantity. Each episode of Ugly Betty has more plot twists than an entire season of Grey’s Anatomy.

That’s hardly to say Ugly Betty isn’t smart. With story arcs more sophisticated than any quip on Desperate Housewives, Ugly Betty doesn’t need irony to prove its intelligence, and its cultural allusions are celebratory, not critical. “East Side Story,” season one’s West Side Story-themed finale was a tribute to—not a comment on—the musical, and it had all the sentiment of the original. Ugly Betty may not always have songs, but it’s at the theater each week, in spirit, like a regular at his restaurant. You can’t miss her—she’s in the first row. She’ll have her dramedy well-done, extra schmaltz, thank you.

Betty and her family tune in regularly to telenovelas, and if they believe in guilty pleasures at all, that isn’t one of them. Desperate Housewives tells us we can only enjoy soaps when we’re looking down on them. Ugly Betty tells us nothing—it sings its message. Tele-no-what? you ask. Betty proudly answers: Telenovela ella ella eh eh eh.