Ugly Betty 3.7 and 3.8: “Crush’d” and “Tornado Girl”

As should be obvious with this entry, I finally finished watching every single James Bond movie just before Quantum of Solace came out and finally found the time to catch up on some of my favorite shows. Here, it’s catch-up time in the world of Betty Suarez.

“Crush’d”

It’s been strange, watching you two commenters declare your love for Gio. Not that I don’t love him. I truly do. But I’m also very curious about why you think Betty actually deserves “some punishment” for dumping Gio (even though I don’t think she technically “dumped him,” since they were never officially dating in the first place). At the end of s2, I think her final decision, to choose neither Henry nor Gio, was absolutely the right thing to do for Betty Suarez, an unselfish girl who doesn’t want to hurt anybody even if it’s in her better interest. While it would definitely be great to see her with Gio, I’m left wondering where the story would go from there. Shows, especially one with its reality as heightened by this one, need conflict, so I’m very curious as to where you think a Betty-dates-Gio arc would go and still be able to have us care. For instance, I’m amazed that Scrubs has made us care about Turk and Carla for going on eight seasons now, and that show is definitely the exception to the rule of interesting long-term couples.

Believe me, I am in no way trying to start shit. Especially not with UB’s two readers. I am honestly curious.

Hi, Roomie!

Never mind, because Betty gets punished hard in this episode by her rising star of a rock ‘n roll neighbor, Jesse. Unable to get him and his band in at a Mode-sponsored party, Betty decides to take Amanda advice and throw a super-hip roof party at their apartment building. (Amanda, having lost her apartment, is temporarily rooming with Betty, with both positive and negative results.) The party goes off without a hitch – never mind all the drama between Daniel, Wilhelmina and the new CFO – but when Betty goes to find Jesse, she walks in on him making out with Amanda (who knew Betty had a crush on somebody, but was too self-involved to realize that Betty was talking about Jesse). Crushed, she kicks Amanda out, but upon settling her feelings, decides to have her stick around, since Amanda didn’t technically know, and besides, Betty’s love for Jesse was clearly unrequited.

“Tornado Girl”

This week posed a very interesting dilemma for Betty Suarez, something I was planning on asking my wife her opinion on over the weekend, but I just never got around to it. My wife and I have both worked in journalism and publishing in different degrees, so I thought she might have been interested in weighing in on Mode’s most recent debacle.

While Daniel and all of the Meade enterprise’s publishers are out on a retreat, Daniel leaves Betty in charge of finalizing the printing for Mode’s latest issue, and everything seems to go swimmingly. Unfortunately, the American Midwest is suddenly hit with vicious tornados and storms, which leads Betty to return to the printing factory and demand that they reprint the entire magazine with a new cover. Why? Because the main story is Mode’s “Fashion Storm,” complete with a cover picture of a model morphed into a tornado. In order to reprint the entire set of issues, it would cost Meade Publishing a couple hundred thousand dollars (this, in a time where the editor’s retreat was intended for the CFO to assess which magazines should be shut down to save the company money), but it would also presumably save Mode from a publicity nightmare. She can only get permission from Daniel, though, so Betty hires a skywriter to get him to call her (all the editors had to give up their cell phones and PDAs). Daniel, secretly, allows the issue to go through and gets it to be Mode’s highest-selling issue, unintentionally getting Betty get all the blame from the news media (including Suzuki St. Pierre) and nasty calls from offended Midwesterners. In the end, Daniel decides to reveal that he was the one who released the offensive issue and declared that all proceeds would go to benefiting the tornado victims.

Now, this is just me talking, but I would have absolutely allowed the issue to go through. The majority of Americans are smart enough to know that if a monthly publication releases an unintentionally controversial issue only the day after a natural disaster, the decision was not made to be tasteless but simply that the magazine would be unable to shift gears so closely to the end. The media blitz would not have been nearly as bad, and the total production cost would have been too great to outweigh whatever would have happened. I appreciate Daniel’s final decision and would have recommended that to a point (the donation angle, that is), but I simply couldn’t get behind the moral implications of the storyline. Publishing is a tough business with tough decisions, but I just don’t think that Mode would have been boycotted by anybody, and whatever controversy would have simply blown over by the next issue.

Then again, I’m just a west coast guy. What do I know about how people react to tornados? We just get big honking earthquakes.

Still, it was a very good episode, especially with the Marc/Cliff saga of Cliff asking Marc to move in with him, Marc freaking out and cheating on him, guilt-ridden Marc proposing to Cliff, Marc revealing his infidelity, and Cliff ending their relation perhaps forever. Now that’s a story I can get behind.

The Wife:

Just reading this now, I’d like to respond to my husband’s inquiry about my thoughts on the Mode Tornado scandal. I actually had to deal with a similar situation back when I was editing the literary magazine at my high school. (I know, my career in publishing has been long and highly lauded.) We were going into hell week for the winter issue of the magazine and all of the editors were turning in their pages to the Chief so that our moderator could take them to the publisher that night. That day, we heard that a student at our school had committed suicide. His name was K.C. As I was proofing the pages for my section that afternoon, I noticed that we were about to print a story about teen suicide featuring a female character named Casey. The issue would “hit stands” on Friday, only two days after our classmate’s death. Fearing the issue was too sensitive at the time, I pulled the story and did the best I could to assemble a new page out of the slush pile. I wouldn’t say that I was happy with the layout I provided for that section in the end, but I do still feel I made the right decision to pull the suicide story.

The issue got a little more complicated, however, when the author of one of the stories I had decided to run instead was upset with an edit I made to her piece, which just happened to be about lesbianism. (Note to all girls who submit stories about lesbianism to high school literary magazines: if you’re willing to submit that, you better be willing to accept the ramifications of publishing it.) I felt the piece ended without real resolution, which is why I hadn’t considered publishing it without the author making changes. But I was in a bind, and her work had potential with a change in the final line, that made the whole thing just a touch more gay.

In any case, I explained the suicide story situation to both the author and our moderators, who supported my decision to pull said story in light of K.C.’s death. They were even okay with the super-gay replacement story, in the end.

Now, if Daniel Meade were in my situation, writing for a small magazine with local or regional distribution, I would argue that he absolutely should have pulled the tornado cover, if not the whole fashion spread. In regional journalism, the affect your work has on its readers really matters. The potential loss of your entire readership base would be far greater than the financial hit you’d take reprinting a couple thousand copies. However, for a magazine with national distribution, I agree with Daniel’s decision to run the story as is. My husband is right; it would simply cost too much money to reprint the entire run of a magazine from cover to cover. (Furthermore, Betty, you can’t make that demand of a printer unless you’ve brought the replacement cover in a PDF along with a replacement fashion spread so that he can fashion a new plate. It’s a lot more people who have to work overtime to fix that issue than just the printer.) People may be upset, certainly, but there are two ways to diffuse that: a.) immediately issue a press release explaining that the issue had already gone to print when the tornado struck and that there was nothing to be done and b.) donate a portion of the proceeds from sale of the issue to the affected families.