Movies and TV shows: Priceless, Ugly Betty, Men of a Certain Age
I have a couple of posts in mind for later this week that I don’t have time to watch today, so instead I just have a few quick words to say about movies and TV. First, there’s the matter of movie recommendations for Mom.
Mom likes her movies light and happy, and we’ve been watching a string of movies that just didn’t look suitable for Mom. There was Secret Smile, in which David Tennant is a scary stalker (and, worst of all, absolutely no one in the movie believes the woman being stalked), there was La Strada, a really good early Fellini movie, but one with a very sad ending, and so on. But I think I’ve finally hit a Mom movie: Priceless, a French farce starring Audrey Tautoo, about a woman who makes her living as a girl friend of rich men, and the bar tender who falls in love with her after she mistakes him for someone richer. It’s as light as you can ask for, and funny.
Second, fans of Ugly Betty by now know that the series is being cancelled after the end of this season. Judging from the Facebook feed of Vanessa’s brother Chris (who was also, in a recent episode, her drag queen doppelganger Wilheldiva Hater), it sounds as if the cancellation came as a surprise to the cast, but then, Gawker’s already reported that as well. Vanessa’s Facebook feed remains upbeat, reporting, along with the latest from Ugly Betty, the news that Vanessa’s returning to Broadway in Sondheim on Sondheim.
Racialicious reflected on some of the factors that may have led to Ugly Betty’s slide in the ratings.
I do think, however, Ugly Betty had some very specific issues related to its slide in the ratings. The first is its effort to be both comedy and drama. Its inclusion of drama meant its characters needed to be taken seriously: this made Betty’s perpetual “ugliness” get old quite quick and made me (and likely others) desire her character to “grow” and “do better.” Betty’s professional and physical transformation happened too late and too awkwardly, and when it did, it wasn’t funny. Sticking with the “ugly Betty” premise meant it needed to stick to camp and wit. But camp flies in the face of other tendencies in U.S. one-hour dramedies: making characters relatable (here, Betty, through drama), making outsiders (Latinas from Queens) eventually fit in and become successful, and making both narratives and appearances neat and “pretty.”
It struck me, reading this, what a range of programs get described as “dramedy.” Ugly Betty and Men of a Certain Age both fit in that category. But Ugly Betty, despite some drama and character development, is way further toward the comedy/camp end of that continuum, and Men of a Certain Age, despite humor, is way more toward the drama end.
Since I don’t have time to develop that thought anywhere useful, instead I’ll give you a link to an interview with Andre Braugher (now Owen on Men of a Certain Age).