‘Ugly Betty’ returns, this time looking for self-love

Betty la Fea (Ugly Betty), the most successful soap opera in the history of the genre, needs no introduction. But its main character, Beatriz Pinzón, does need one 25 years after audiences first got to know her. “She is now a woman who wants to remain faithful to her essence, she wants to feel authentic again,” says Ana María Orozco, the actress who played Betty a quarter of a century ago, in a conversation with EL PAÍS. Betty is back, played again by Orozco, in a 10-episode sequel that premieres on Friday on Amazon Prime: Ugly Betty, The Story Continues. In a small preview of Episode 1, Betty tells herself that “right now the only thing that matters is what I want.” She has returned to look for love, but it is not the love of Armando; instead, she is looking for the self-love that she left behind at the end of the original soap opera, when she thought she could only be loved if she cut off her bangs and got a better frame for her glasses.

“You are the way you are, and people have to love you the way you are,” is how Julián Arango, who played the pedantic designer Hugo Lombardi, describes the central message of the sequel. He and most of the original cast joined this new version that was written between several screenwriters. As Jorge Enrique Abello, who plays Armando, says, the sequel would never have happened with the original screenwriter, the talented Fernando Gaitán, who has since passed away: ”To carry out this project we had to say goodbye to Fernando. It seems hard, but it was necessary.”

The original soap opera was transgressive by putting an ugly woman in the lead role, a woman with whom millions of people fell in love because, as Mauricio Cruz, the director of the new series, says: “We have all felt ugly at some point in our lives.” But Orozco admits that in the original version there were scenes that reflected the sexism of the era, scenes that would be unacceptable today. “For example, Armando’s screams at the peliteñida (woman with dyed hair), even physical things like him squeezing her,” she says about the heartthrob’s violence against the blonde secretary known as Patricia Fernández.

In the more than two decades since the launch of Ugly Betty, the Me Too movement, complaints about workplace abuse against women, identity politics and social media have made their way into television. And in keeping with the times, the new story has a good dose of political correctness: a deconstructed lawyer, a community leader who grew up in a southern neighborhood and helps older women, and the first Black model for Ecomoda, the design company that features in the story. Betty and Armando’s daughter, Camila, is a designer who wants to show her talent, but she is also an influencer on social media with a terrible relationship with her mother. Because Ugly Betty, in the 2024 version, is also about how hard motherhood is. “Betty is like many women: even though we are professionals, we work, it is still a challenge to balance work with life, children, the home,” says Orozco.

But that adaptation to the times did not take everything from the original, says Orozco. They tried to remain faithful to the characters with their clumsy laughter, their worn-out phrases and the trademark arrogance of some characters, notably Lombardi, who even mocks the times a little. His insults are of the type: “I won’t call you useless, because I am inclusive.”

Betty’s paradox

The fact that Betty is back 25 years later looking for self-love is no small matter: it is going to the very heart of the problem that the soap opera left pending. “Betty, in the end, had to adjust to the world in order to be loved,” says the director of the feminist magazine Volcánicas, Catalina Ruiz-Navarro, about Betty’s physical transformation to end up being loved by Armando. The predominant idea then was “the idea that you are an ugly duckling, a hidden beauty, and that that beauty will come out if you just groom yourself in a certain way: it means going from curly hair to straight hair, it means removing your braces, changing the frame of your glasses. In the end, for Betty to find love, she had have someone teach her to conform to the beauty parameters accepted at that time.”

The dramatic element in what is supposed to be a comedy went even a little further. Betty also put up with her boyfriend’s mistreatment and agreed to commit fraud at Ecomoda — Armando asked her to jazz up financial reports — putting her own freedom at risk. ”That seemed permissible in the name of love, which is definitely a problem,” says Ruiz.

The paradox of Ugly Betty is that while it put the ugly woman at the center, and that is why it became such a special soap opera worldwide, it also stole that protagonism from her by wrapping her in the same standard of beauty from which she sought to escape. No longer loved by the audience—who adored her bangs, her glasses, her laughter—but loved in the eyes of a man, Armando.

For the anthropologist Valeria Angola, this soap opera exposed the pressure felt by women to fit in. It showed “something that is very present in Colombian society: that culture that is sold to the outside world about the stereotypical pretty Colombian woman. Today, girls have other types of information, but imagine at that moment, all that hegemony of beauty; it was horrible. It was like putting all of Colombia in a mirror; to show how we had internalized that whole culture of models and beauty queens, of plastic surgeries.”

Betty was transgressive for her time and she was also a product of her time. “At that time we did not have as much information and we had not had the debates that we have today,” admits Angola. The new times have highlighted something basic, which should have been evident but was lost among so much machismo: the most important love is not Armando’s, but self-love. Betty, two decades later, is working at it.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition