LOS ANGELES — After four seasons of bright and noisy comic melodrama, Betty Suarez is leaving us to our own devices, as “Ugly Betty,” which bowed in an explosion of color and fairy-tale tropes in the fall of 2006, ended Wednesday night on ABC.
Even as a fan of the show, and especially of the people in it — of the actors as inextricable from their characters — I think this is not a bad time, in the fictional and practical life of the series, to say goodbye.
There are only so many hoops these or any characters can be made to jump through before the complications begin to seem completely manufactured. “Betty,” which was based on a comic Colombian telenovela, has been packed so full of melodramatic events, with so many reversals of fortune and reversals of reversals, so many revelations and revolutions, that I was sure the series had run at least five years instead of the actual four.
And four years is not hay.
Betty has come some way in that time, as she has gradually — and logically, given that she’s been working at a fashion magazine — turned into the image of America Ferrara, the lovely and well-presented screen star who plays her.
One by one, the wig, the braces, the brows, the prosthetic padding have gone, and the substance and the surface have come into line, as when the duckling is revealed as a swan, or the frog becomes a princess, or the secretary takes off her glasses and there stands Marilyn Monroe.
Even thus revealed, Ferrera is by the standards of your average TV heroine too broad, too short, too brown, which is part of what made the show valuable. (It was also just fun.)
As working-class Mexican Americans, the Suarez family of Queens, N.Y. — including Tony Plana as father Ignacio, the excellent Ana Ortiz as sister Hilda and Mark Indelicato as fashionista nephew Justin — were rare for television.
A multicultural fantasia that celebrated difference and the acceptance of difference, whether of race, class, sexual orientation or fashion sense, “Ugly Betty” was also unique in its tone, a mix of comedy and melodrama, the funky and the refined, the fanciful and the actual.
Yet even when the show wasn’t exactly true to life it produced moments of emotional truth. This has much to do with the actors, who do subtle work amid the farce and flamboyance.
They have served us well, these four seasons. The show ends, as it began: a story of renewal, of identity claimed and proclaimed, of lighting out for the territories.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
