Once upon a time, I was the target audience for Ugly Betty. Betty started work in the magazine industry three months and twenty-nine days after I did in 2006. She came from Queens College, I went to school just one state over. We had similar dreams, to do serious, long-form feature writing for some of the best magazines on the planet. Betty ended up at a glossy high-fashion magazine, while I landed at a seriously sober political weekly. And for the first season and a half or so, I followed her trajectory obsessively, enjoying the soapsuds and the deeply fictionalized perspective on our industry. But I fell away eventually: I found the bitchiness of Marc and Amanda, two of Betty's colleagues, exhausting after a while, Betty's boy drama repetitive, etc..
But more than plot fatigue, I found the image of journalism just totally unsustainable. The publication I was at went through layoffs five months after I worked my way into my first writing job. The idea of getting a car service, much less an in-office steam room (things Betty gets introduced to at the beginning of the fourth season when she becomes a junior editor) started to seem not so much enviable as obscene. And more than that, Betty's continued willingness to put her boss (and now former boss) above her career (though Ugly Betty doesn't seem on the trajectory of the Betty la Fea iterations that preceded it, which hook up Betty and the boss), and to continue to pursue assignments that have nothing to do with her long-term goals (a high-fashion mosquito net shoot at the UN) started to seem a little...annoying to me. Bashing Betty makes me feel horribly guilty, like I'm throwing my girlfriend under the bus. But after three years, I want Betty to actually behave like the working adult she's trying to be. Or I reserve the right to judge her.
Now, I'm not saying that everything about journalism can only be depicted in strictly realistic terms. This is a soap opera we're talking about, and I enjoy the suds. Ugly Betty is always a singularly good-looking show, not merely because it's set at a fashion magazine--there's a glorious vignette in the Season 4 premiere involving a lot of butterflies that is the height of gorgeous-looking fantasy. But there's a lot of drama to be mined from economic squeezes, something the show seems to understand really well when Betty's at home, and something that could only enhance competition and cattiness between the junior employees. New York seems to think the glorification of pre-layoff Conde Nast is a sentimental homage, but to me, it seems like a symptom that the show doesn't know how to exploit what's actually making the pot boil in Betty's work universe today. And that's terribly de-Mode.