My beef with the "No on Prop. 8" ad targeting Latino communities...

In my previous post I took a slight dig at the "No on Prop. 8" campaign ads targeting the Latino community in California. I wasn't going to comment further but then comes an article posted online yesterday at The Advocate on the inside game at the campaign ("In the belly of No on 8"):

The media revamp has included a new Spanish-language push, with ads running on Spanish-language media outlets featuring Ugly Betty stars America Ferrerra, Tony Pena, and Ana Ortiz. Getting the ads done was a challenge, considering the three actors were in New York and the campaign had less than a few days to write, produce, and distribute the ads.

“That spot seems to be touching people,” said one of [Patrick] Guerriero’s colleagues, a senior executive at a major media company who took a leave of absence to work full-time on the campaign. “Young Latinos were looking for a way to talk about this with their parents. They didn’t feel comfortable having that conversation in Spanish. This is definitely filling a need.”

I think it's great that the stars donated their time and were willing to be part of the campaign. Kudos to them. But here's what rubs me the wrong way.

1. They used the wrong "Ugly Betty" cast: "Ugly Betty" is an English-language version of an incredibly popular Spanish-language television soap opera. I am no pollster but I have a feeling that the Latino viewers who watch the English version are not the ones that need to be convinced to vote against Prop. 8. They already sit to watch the gayest show on network television to begin with and the fact that they understand English means they probably are more acculturated than recent US citizens which are probably the ones that need to be made at ease about opposing Prop. 8. The "No on 8" campaign might have done better by reaching out to the cast of Mexican version of "Ugly Betty" if they were looking for a bigger impact.

2. All Latinos are not the same: For some of us who watch the show from time to time, one of the most jarring thing is that the cast of the US show is the fact that we recognize that the actors all come from different ethnic backgrounds even if they are supposed to be from the same Queens family. America Ferrera, who plays Betty, was born in Los Angeles to Honduran parents; Ana Ortiz, who plays her sister Hilda is of Puerto Rican-Irish descent; and Tony Plana, who plays their father Ignacio, was born in Cuba - and it shows in the way the carry themselves. This is fine for a television show where you can look over these type of discrepancies but I'm not that certain that using the actors to carry the message to Latinos in California speaks to California Latinos specifically. As with the presdiential campaign, it looks as if the folks who decided to use the cast of the American version of "Ugly Betty" fell for the generalization that any Latino can sway another Latino and that's just not the case (it's that mythical political Latino block that has been so elusive this year). Ferrera, who made her career in California, looks and feels authentically Californian which actually really counts when it comes to the Latino community in California.

3. Accents: In the Spanish version, below, Tony Plana is the only one of the three actors who speaks Spanish without an Americanized accent. Not that America or Ana do bad at all (actually, they do great) but you still notice it. But, again, I have a feeling that the movable Spanish speaking masses might be more movable if it came from spokespeople who did not have an Americanized accent when they spoke Spanish.

4. La familia: OK, I acknowledge this is a personal pet peeve but how come every time someone says 'We gotta reach Latinos' the immediate reaction is 'familia'? "For Latinos family is important" says the video. Hm, yes? Same as with other cultures? To be fair, this Latino familia trope is not limited to Anglos seeking Latino authenticity. Latino organizations do it too. But, personally it drives me up a wall. It brings up trite hacienda images of abuelita rocking in her rocking chair as her grandson makes a call on an AT&T phone or of Jimmy Smits in the trite (and cancelled) "Cane". But that's just me. Perhaps swayable Latino Californians truly really think about family above all but methinks a lot of them don't necessarily have the wealthy extended hacienda-type families of "Cane". I'm just sayin'.

Which brings us back to quote from The Advocate. Statements that the campaign only sought to create a Spanish language campaign late in the game (as they "revamped" the message) and assurances that it "seems" to be touching people betray the fact that they should have known for a long time that minority communities should have been included in the game plan long before now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perhaps I'm being one of those angry politically correct Latinos who only think about la raza! (Hm, not really?). And perhaps I read waaaay too much stuff into little things. But come Tuesday (and I truly hope that Prop. 8 is defeated and for some reason I think it will) it speaks to the divide between state and national LGBT organizing strategies and LGBT communities of color.

Spanish language version of the ad below:

Ugly Betty for Hillary (Wilson Cruz for Obama?)

This election is too important to stand on the sidelines, especially for my generation, I believe that Hillary Clinton can turn this country around - Ugly Betty

That's actress America Ferrera, who is the star of the ABC television show "Ugly Betty" as quoted by the Great Britain's The Independent.

We don't doubt the intelligence and political commitment of America - even if we have been consistently underwhelmed by the show - but I am still sticking with Barack Obama.

By the way I've heard that openly gay actor and hottie Wilson Cruz (best known for the groundbreaking series "My So-Called LIfe" also on ABC) is for Obama.

I'll confirm later if I get in touch with him.

That reminds me, I should really get the complete "My So-Called Life" series on DVD.

Ugly Betty: The good, the bad and the ugly

With so much advance critical praise and positive word-of-mouth, Thursday night's premiere of Ugly Betty brought beautiful rating numbers for ABC. It drew 16.1 million people without piggy-backing on a big hit (though it was followed by the blockbuster "Grey's Anatomy") which made it the top rated debut series so far this season (I wonder what the demographic breakdown was).

In the age of YouTube, ABC is trying a new approach this year and allowing potential viewers who might have missed episodes of some of their shows like "Lost" and "Grey's Anatomy" (my current favorite) to watch them online - but only for a week after they have aired. This includes "Ugly Betty" so if you missed the first episode (or any future episodes) just go here a couple of days after that week's episode airs.

We certainly fretted about the debut in a previous post and expected to be let down (at first because we thought it would be impossible to translate Betty from its original Colombian television soap incarnation and then after the overwhelming advance praise since it was hard to believe the show would live up to the hype). So, how did it fare?

The good: America Ferrera is amazing! She IS the show and carries the true spirit of the original Betty. Also, most of the exteriors were actually shot in New York City (and Queens) instead of a make-up "NYC world" (see "Friends"). I also loved the character of Justin, Betty's 12 year-old nephew, who knows more about fashion and couture than any 12 year-old boy should truly know, unless... And then there are the telenovelas within the show which Betty's family always seems to be watching on their television set with producer Selma Hayeck vamping it up for laughs. Good stuff.

The bad: Vanessa Williams: I hate that the show has chosen to make one of the most beautiful and talented women in the United States such a hateful and bitchy villain. I also thought that it was a mistake to turn everyone else at the office into truly unlikable foes when, in the original, even the bad folks had a sweetness to them. Actress Lorna Paz (pictured above), for example, played a hilarious ladder-climbing "dyed-blond" secretary who would flip her long hair and have men fall at her feet (she can be seen flipping her hair here). She would splurge on high-commodity items such as a BMW and wear top-line clothing to make sure that she would look stunning and make people think she was high-class. But she'd always be borrowing money and, secretly, she wouldn't even pay her electricity bills (when inviting someone over, she'd light up a bunch of candles purportedly to 'set the mood' though the audience knew that without them her place would be dark).

We previously had said that some of the Betty re-makes lost something in painting their characters too broadly and robbing them of complex character traits and, at least in the pilot, the US version seems to have done this as well with the exception of Betty and, perhaps, her nephew.

The ugly: The humiliating scene in which Betty is asked to dress up for a fashion shoot was cruel, humiliating and unduly harsh. Gina Gershon's poodle-totting, silicon-lipped Italian caricature was humorless and distracting. The concept of a Mexican-family in Queens didn't quite congeal into a whole, and the actors playing them seem to be channeling members of totally different families. And, judging by previews of the next episode, they already will be cashing in on the popularity of "The Devil Wears Prada" with a storyline that seems directly lifted from the film.

OK, maybe some of that is not quite ugly but it certainly is somewhat disappointing. I'll keep watching thanks to America Ferrera and hope that, this being the pilot, future episodes will allow the other characters to breathe a little and hopefully become the great show that was promised. If only there was a little more Lorna Paz-ness.

A whole different take on the show at Miss Wild Thing's.

Other assorted takes:

• Pop culture junkies ruminates even longer than I do here
• I seem to have channeled some Good Nonsense here
• TMZ has a video capture of the telenovela within the show here
• TV Squad gets it right, right here

Cultural benchmark: Ugly Betty on ABC

As someone who was born in Colombia, South America, it's difficult to explain why a Colombian television soap opera should be the source of so much pride - but it is. In it's original incarnation "Yo Soy Betty La Fea" (which debuted in Colombia in 1,999) broke television rating records in Colombia (as it would when it was re-broadcast in the United States on Telemundo as "Betty La Fea") and marked the culmination of a period in which Colombian television was producing some of the best and most original television fare in Latin America with the exception, perhaps, of Brazil.

What distinguished Betty from the rest was the fact that it up-ended the usual Latin American television soap tropes, at least for a while, by being razor-sharp in lambasting the vacuous, greedy and self-involved world of the wealthy while making its nerdy and prat-fall prone heroine, her co-worker secretaries and her low-income family the moral center of the story. That the show did it with panache, incredible amounts of humor and a focus on narrative and character development added to its sweetness (lead writer Fernando Gaitán had to do a lot with this). Incidentally, it was also one of a number of Colombian television shows that had a leading gay character shown in a positive light despite the fact that as the lead designer for the fashion firm in which the show takes place, the character makes life hell for Betty.

The casting of beautiful actress Ana Maria Orosco as Betty betrayed an original intent of eventually succumbing to genre and making "Betty La Fea" conform to an ugly-duckling narrative and, to their credit, once the soap became as popular as it did, the writer and the producers did their best to delay the "transformation," despite polls that showed that viewers wanted Betty to remain ugly (for Halloween, little girls went out trick-or-treating dressed up as little Ugly Betties). Unfortunately, by then it was obvious that the story-lines were being stretched (possibly to cash-in to Telemundo's demands for more and more "Betty" since episodes were being shown in the United States before the soap came to an end in Colombia). In any case, a classic had been born.

Following the success of Betty, Univision stole the characters from Telemundo an produced a sequel that flopped big time. They bowdlerized the characterizations, broadened the humor by stripping away any complexity and went for the easy laugh, which included turning the gay character into a stereotypically bitchy queen stick-figure bordering on homophobic. It also began the unfortunate trend in Spanish-language television of training actors to lose their regional accents purportedly in order to appeal to a larger viewership and of drawing some of the best acting talent from Latin America to take part in mega-soap productions that draw on the worst aspects of Latin American soap operas (take the trashy but dramatically limp "Pasion de Gavilanes" on Telemundo which creates a bizarro-world cowboy environment for actors from different countries to play related family members in the middle of an overwrought feud between dynasties).

Recent re-incarnations of "Betty" haven't fared better, at least the Spanish language ones. Univision is currently showing "La Fea Mas Bella" ("The Most Beautiful Ugly One") produced by Mexico's Televisa which amps up the caricature factor and loses out on subtle humor. Though I hear that there's a version of Betty in Germany played for drama rather than humor that has been well-received. Online you can even compare the opening credits and segments of the original here (with a handy Hebrew translation), to those of the version from Spain here, Mexico here, Russia here and here, India here and here, Germany here (yes, the phenomenon is THAT wide-sperad and why the show, just like the singer Shakira, has been embraced as some sort of national symbol in Colombia).

So excuse me if I cringed when I first heard that Selma Hayek had bought rights to the soap and was producing a pilot for ABC. And things didn't necessarily look spectacular when ABC released its pilot promo reel with a crass poncho joke and with news of changes to the script that do away with Betty's camaraderie with her co-workers (even though I LOVE America Ferrera who will be playing Betty).

Surprisingly, though, the promo reel might not be all there is to it. Recently, it was announced that the first episode of "Ugly Betty" would be moved to Thursdays at 8pm (EST), just before the ABC jugger-naut "Grey's Anatomy" - based on advance buzz at pilot screenings. The show won't be debuting until September 28th but today it just got a huge advance push from the Los Angeles Times ("Ugly never looked so good" - Sept. 16, 2006) which quotes anonymous producers who have seen it as being "faithful to the original."

The Houston Voice says "The ugly news is that 'Ugly Betty' is coming, and gay viewers will love her."

The Washington Post says "A scream, a howl, a hoot and a joy, this buoyant, poignant series about a less than gorgeous young woman working for a fashion mag is the season's best and most beguiling new comedy" (they also say that ABC plans to show the debut episode online after Sept. 29th, should anyone miss it).

The Hollywood Reporter says "At first blush, it seems as if there's too much going on in 'Betty' -- the pilot plants the seeds of everything from a murder-mystery plot to a hint at a developing love triangle for Betty -- but it helps to remember that it's inspired by a telenovela, something the show does subtly by showing Betty and her family frequently watching over-the-top Spanish-language serials at their home in Queens."

Ok, so the show that was originally set in Bogota, Colombia, is now set in Queens, New York, and who can argue with that?

With so much advance praise, it's easy to set "Ugly Betty" as a show that won't live up to expectations but I really hope that it's as good as it's been reported. I also hope that the ABC version, if successful, won't jump the shark and offer a very special 'transformation' episode. America Ferrera is one beautiful woman, but PLEASE ABC, keep Betty ugly!!

UPDATE: The good, the bad and the ugly (September 29, 2006)