A sly satire on race and class makes a welcome and witty comment on the US
Ugly Betty
Channel 4
Ugly Betty's teeth make the point. Under their constitution, Americans have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of orthodontics. The first two rights may have been eroded, but the US is the most beautifully toothed nation in the world, its perfection even causing casting problems in Hollywood. Deadwood, for example, a brutal depiction of 19th-century frontier America, loses credibility every time a member of its cast bares his beautiful teeth.
No such worries here. Betty Suarez's face is cluttered with metal. Her braces indicate less an aspiration to fulfil the US dental dream than that her mind has been on higher things during its teenage years. A graduate of Queens University, one of America's "best-value colleges", Betty is a serious student who wants to work for a news magazine. Instead, when she turns up at Meade Publishing Corp, she is dragooned into work for Mode, a thinly disguised version of Vogue. The appointment is made by the mogul Bradford Meade, who has accurately judged that his libidinous son Daniel, newly appointed by him as editor-in-chief, requires an assistant he will not try to sleep with.
At first Daniel wants Betty out, but soon realises he needs her if he is to survive in the cut-throat kingdom he has inherited. Both are ingénus, unaccustomed to the nastiness of fashion journalism, the only real difference being that he, in his Versace suits, looks the part and she, in her scarlet poncho, never will. The casting is spot on. Eric Mabius and America Ferrera as boss and PA find a comedy in their innocence that crosses gender, class and appearance yet does not include the possibility of sex.
Oh, but the world of beauty is an ugly one! Every woman who works at Mode looks like a model; every man is a gay bitch. Betty's co-workers mutilate her good-luck charm, a cloth rabbit. Vain, trivial and snobbish, Cinderella's beautiful sisters live by deceit and Botox, and their product is the ultimate expression of their dishonesty. In the second episode (12 January), an actress (based on Renée Zellweger) is shocked to discover that her pictures have been Photoshopped to relieve her of every ounce of fat. She wistfully takes to the computer herself, reducing her body's width until it disappears altogether. Into this environment Betty brings not only puppy fat, but an integrity that Daniel attempts to find.
Advertised as a sitcom, Ugly Betty (Fridays, 9.30pm) is actually a comedy-drama. The half-hour sitcom is on life support in the US, and in its place has come the 60-minute dramedy of shows such as Grey's Anatomy, Boston Legal and Desperate Housewives. American television is infamous for copycatting, and this show's strong premise is compromised by a murder-mystery plot cribbed straight from Desperate Housewives. In mitigation, the actress Salma Hayek, its executive producer, may be able to claim that she is in fact merely copying the format of Colombian telenovelas - one of which is Yo soy Betty, la fea, from which Ugly Betty is a licensed rip.
Its originality, in the US context, is that it confronts race and class. Latin American Betty lives in New York's grubby underbelly, Queens. Her father, an illegal immigrant, heads a family of hard workers. So it is that Betty finds allies among the rude mechanicals at Mode, the chief of these being the seamstress Christina, played by our own Ashley Jensen (whose acting sits more happily in this exaggerated environment than in the nominally realistic Extras).
Ugly Betty may seem to have less edge than Sex and the City, but I would say it has more, as beauty here is not a defendable aspiration, but a metaphor for the class/race war. Beauty was once the wild card in the US meritocracy, creating its own aristocrats from the streets. Now, thanks to stylists, cosmetic surgery and photo-manipulation, it, too, can be bought, leaving the underclass identifiable by its looks. The only hypocrisy in this sweet satire with its feature-film production values is, of course, that the perfectly complexioned America Ferrera is not ugly. She could be turned round in an episode of Trinny and Susannah.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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