telenovela

A highlight of each Ugly Betty episode is our momentary glimpse of Ignacio's favorite telenovela Vidas de Fuego (Lives of Fire). Starting Thursday, you'll be able to see the full mini-telenovela in a series of six webisodes at ABC.com. Vidas de Fuego is the first in a series of two online telenovelitas that will be offered by ABC in connection with Ugly Betty.

If you haven't been able to piece together Vidas de Fuego's plot just yet, here's the deal. Vidas de Fuego is set on the cattle ranch of the wealthy Rivera family. Sofia Rivera is seducing her stepson Galo in order to gain control of the family's fortune. Meanwhile, the gorgeous maid is pregnant by her secret lover - the local priest. Who will gain control of the family's empire? Will the priest's cover be blown? Is that really his baby? Dios mio!

(S01E08) This show has so many great moments and is so confident in its candy-colored, postmodern style that you can almost overlook the shortcomings of its less than stellar episodes. I should qualify that comment by saying that Ugly Betty's "less than stellar" is akin to any other show's "home run." The bar's just that high, dreamgirls.

Ugly Betty is a hybrid - part "center and eccentrics" dramedy with America Ferrera as its heart and part telenovela. Most of the criticisms I read about the show revolve around the series being too much telenovela and not enough Betty or vice versa. I've got no problem with the hybrid form, but it does lay at the heart at what I thought was this episode's weakness - balance.

(S01E07) The construction of this week's Ugly Betty episode was just plain masterful. We had four parallel stories - each dealing with romantic relationships at profoundly different points in their evolution. The writers have, in particular, been juxtaposing Wilhelmina and Betty's travails to great effect. We got dual make-overs in "Queens for a Day."

This week, we got two classic fish out of water stories. Wilhelmina at a barely disguised Hogs & Heifers, and Betty at an upscale Soho hotel eatery. What's nice about this show is that both worlds - the corporate version of lowbrow and the needlessly pretentious highbrow - were presented as equally artificial and brainless. Somewhere in the middle is where we might find a really good burger and Babbo. While the Mode staff's struggles don't stack up to having an illegal immigrant dad who can't get his heart medication, the writers and actors have done a superb job of giving the Manhattanites' emotional lives some weight. And, best of all, no tiresome Fey storyline this week.

Now since the writer's took the time to construct the A, B, C and D stories so intricately, we might as well tackle them that way.

In my review of the last episode of Ugly Betty, I asked our lovely and intelligent readership if they noticed that a couple of key scenes in the "Previously on" teaser were not actually in previous episodes. Not only did they notice it, they also let me know that the episode that showed last Thursday, "Fey's Sleigh Ride", was the sixth episode produced, even though it was the fourth one that aired.

Indeed, to make sure, I posed the question to one of my favorite TV critics, Alan Sepinwall, on his personal blog, figuring he had some inside info that I didn't. He directed me to TV.com's episode listing (duh... why didn't I think of doing that?), which indeed shows that this was the sixth episode made. The fifth will air this week, and the fourth, called "Swag", will air during November sweeps. So the order is: 6, 5, 7, 8, 4, 10.

As we all get ready to welcome in the new CW network, it stands to reason that the merger must have left a few stations out there holding the bag. What is to become of them? The answer for some is that they will now be a part of News Corporation's myNetworkTV. The network begins airing its two original programs Tuesday, September 5th.

Those programs are Desire and Fashion House. Modeled after the popular telenovelas, each show will run five days a week, Monday through Friday, with a recap on Saturday. Rather than the endless run that normal American soap operas have, the myNetworkTV shows are each planned to run 65 episodes. As they come crashing to what promises to be a hectic conclusion after 13 weeks, two new shows will debut to run for the next 13.

Desire kicks off the night at 8PM. It is the story of brothers Louis and Alex Thomas. On the run from the mob, they make their way to Los Angeles. There, they both fall for the same woman and complications ensue as they deal with that and the mob gets ever closer. Desire is adapted from 2004's Mesa Para Tres (Table For Three).

Kelsey Grammer is returning to comedic television, but only behind-the-scenes. He has agreed to direct the CBS comedy pilot, My Ex-Life, about about two divorced couples and the way they deal with life after divorce. Former Love Monkey and Ed actor Tom Cavanah snagged a lead role in this show.

Despite a list of cancelled shows, The CW doesn't think that Wayne Brady is bad luck. The new network has picked up a comedy pilot called Flirt, starring Brady as the only man working at a women's magazine.

Bo Derek has joined the cast of Secret Obsessions, a telenovela-style, primetime soap opera on My Network TV, the network that FOX is creating out of its UPN stations that lost their affiliation earlier this year. Secret Obsessions is about the glamorous, yet ruthless world of fashion. Derek will play Maria Zianni, a mega-bitch who runs a fashion corporation.

[Via The Hollywood Reporter]