Ugly Betty is Looking Camp Right in the Eye
There's a Martha Stewart cameo in the first season's thanksgiving episode. I rest my case.
Unfortunately, the combination of my predilection for cool girl novels (aka literary fiction about depressed art students) and reality tv (specifically dating shows for millennials one CrossFit session away from a breakdown) has caught up to me. I have been in desperate need of joy and a healthy dose of escapism. My antidote: the entirely unhinged comedy-drama birthed in the later half of the 2000s, Ugly Betty. I’m only halfway through re-watching the first season, and I cannot overstate how unserious yet critical to the zeitgeist this show is. Let’s talk about it.
We’re literally rooting for a nepo baby. The premise of this show rests on the unlikely alliance between Betty Suarez, Executive Assistant and regular-degular girl from Queens with big dreams of becoming a writer, and Daniel Meade, Editor-In-Chief of MODE Magazine, who is son of none other than Bradford Meade, CEO of Meade Publications. Betty is hired by Bradford on the absolutely ridiculous grounds of being “un-fuckable” by his son, and her empathy extends so far in her budding relationship with Daniel, that through her eyes we are able to see a bumbling cis white straight man as a flawed yet lovable doofus in needing of saving despite his immense privilege.
In one episode, an exasperated Betty confesses to Daniel that she’s stressed. Throughout the season we see her worrying about things like helping pay for medicine or an immigration lawyer for her father. Daniel retorts that everyone has problems, rattling off objectively lesser inconveniences like not being able to get the woman he wants or being taken off the company credit card. I’m obsessed with the very fine line between positing them as clear opposites and simultaneous equals. Like half the time Betty cleans up his messes, she makes Daniel look good so that he can gain the approval he so desperately seeks from his father, and we’re supposed to be charmed by Daniel simply offering to give Betty credit (which she does not take)?? I’m choosing to believe the writers wanted to convey Betty’s fierce loyalty with this, but my girl is so deep in the trenches. Free her!
And don’t even get me started on them framing Wilhelmina Slater, as Daniel’s arch-nemesis. She is a hundred times more competent in her role as Creative Director and rightfully believes she is more deserving of the Editor-in-Chief role. Yet she is made out to be ungrateful and somehow expected to help Daniel with a smile on her face. Like I don’t care if she’s a bitch. She can actually do the job! And you’re damn right I would be mad if a mid dude with no experience took my promotion. Now that I write this out, I may be projecting.
The set design is so cunty. When I read that the brief Production Designer, Mark Worthington had to work with was “iPodesque lobby,” my jaw dropped. Like it truly does not get better than this.
I implore you to spend the next ten minutes of your life looking through the entire collection of images of his work from the show. You will not regret it.
Something changed in the hardwiring of my brain when I watched this show as a child, and I honestly think 50 percent of it was how glamorous I thought this office was. I’ve now worked at a few places that have fulfilled my fantasy at first, but they sort of lost the illusion after being the sweaty production assistant stuffing a printed poster into a plastic frame from Duane Reade to decorate the green room.
Salma Hayek plays my worst nightmare. I’m kind of living for how many villains there are on this show that are women of color, and I fully believe her character arc specifically deserves a ten page analysis. As Sofia Reyes, Editor-in-Chief of women’s magazine, MYW (which is looking to launch under the same banner of Meade Publications), Hayek takes on the dreaded trope of progressive-feminist-baddie-who-doesn’t-need-a-man falls for literally the most sexaholic douchebag bachelor you can think of (aka Daniel Meade), and suddenly throws out her morals and radicalism for the white picket fence. It’s giving Pick Me. It’s giving Stockholm Syndrome. It’s giving I’m going to date my colonizer. For my The Bold Type girls, it reminds me of when Kat Edison randomly dates a republican.
Except the plot twist is that in this case, Reyes actually fully scams Daniel for the sake of her magazine launch and I’m left even more devastated because while an iconic move to take reparations into your own hands to get the bag, she loses the plot and loses all integrity while doing so. Like girl, capitalism really got you with that one. You could’ve been Betty’s mentor! And instead now Betty is left disillusioned and picking up the pieces for this white man yet again, which somehow devolves into a side episode of her trying to turn Daniel back into a womanizer as he tries to pull off fake tanner. I know the show is already done, but once again I am begging the writers to give my girl some PTO.
In all seriousness, I think that’s what I love about this show watching it back as an adult who now works in media — while being extremely chaotic and regressive (it bears mentioning that there is very problematic trans representation and a plot line that deserves a much more nuanced analysis and think piece than I am capable of), it was also was so boldly ahead of it’s time and hits the nail on the head of how toxic the industry can really be. And how disappointing and hard that can be to navigate when you’re trying to chase your passion. I mean, to sum it up, a show literally called UGLY Betty was the pinnacle of feminism in the late 2000s. And if there’s one thing about me, I love a messy portrayal of the complexities of womanhood.