Fans Get Ugly Over Plot Twists of ‘Betty’ as Soap Run Nears End

The woman calling a Miami talk radio station last week was incensed. What were they doing to her TV heroine?

The fictional Betty is supposed to be a modern, independent woman who gets ahead on brains and bravery, not looks. It’s bad enough that her chief virtue to many viewers--her ugliness--has been disappearing by the day. Is it true she’d be marrying the boss’ son, an abuser of women? “What can I tell my daughters now?” demanded the caller, who has held up Betty to her two girls as a role model.

This month, a phenomenon in Spanish-language television comes to a close. A prime-time soap opera with a homely female lead, “Yo Soy Betty, La Fea,” (“I Am Betty, the Ugly”) has won more than 80 million viewers throughout the Western Hemisphere, from South America’s Tierra del Fuego to Torrance.

The moral of the Colombian-made show, innovative for Spanish-language soaps, was that beauty is only skin deep and that work and character are what count. It has a feminist message.

The trouble is, Betty, played by striking model Ana Maria Orozco, 27, has gotten decidedly less fea as the five-times-a-week series nears its conclusion. She’s stopped slicking her dark hair down onto her scalp, has lost the clunky eyeglasses, waxed off her mustache, and begun behaving less like a klutz. She still wears braces on her teeth, but those are likely to disappear as well.

Last week, word got out in the Spanish-language media that in the final episode of “Betty,” likely to be aired Friday on the U.S. Telemundo network, a now gorgeous Betty will wed Don Armando--the boss’ son--played by Jorge Enrique Abello. If true, that would give the series the same trite Cinderella ending as umpteen other Spanish-language telenovelas.

“If Betty doesn’t wed Armando, she will not be successful because she has not achieved love, which in Latin America is what marks success,” Colombian television critic Omar Rincon explained, according to Miami’s El Nuevo Herald paper.

Dismayed, many viewers have been voicing their objections. The switchboard at Colombia’s RCN network, which airs “Betty” in that country, reportedly has been jammed with callers demanding that their heroine stay single out of feminist principles or a sense of woman’s autonomy.

On Spanish-language Web sites, the debate rages, with fans from around the world jumping in. If Betty’s theme is altered, “it’ll revert to the bad taste of run-of-the-mill soap operas,” wrote Luis Reyes of San Diego.

Other fans are more philosophical. “It’s a show about society, about how the upper class looks down on the lower class,” said Lillian Canizales, a Puerto Rican-born accountant who lives in South Florida. “It’s unbelievable and the ending is predictable, but it’s enjoyable.”

A word of caution about the outcome of all this is definitely in order. The show’s creator, Fernando Gaitan, is famously whimsical. And, according to Roxanna Brightwell, a Telemundo vice president, he may in fact have written more than one final episode.

“It cannot end with the marriage,” Brightwell maintained in an interview.

Since Aug. 7, Spanish-speakers in the U.S. have been able to follow Betty’s story on Telemundo stations and affiliates, including KVEA in Glendale.

In past months, Betty, a financial whiz, has clawed her way to the top at the Bogota, Colombia, fashion house founded by Armando’s father. She’s made it through smarts and hard work because she didn’t have any feminine wiles (until lately).

It is a feminist plot twist as groundbreaking in its way as Nora leaving her husband in Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House.”

“Latin American soaps are all about the class struggle,” Gaitan, the series’ creator, once explained. “They’re made for poor people in countries where it’s hard to get ahead in life. Usually, the characters succeed through love. In mine, they get ahead through work.”

Hence the disappointment felt by some at how their favorite show reportedly is going to turn out. But for many fans, the program’s end, whatever it is, will leave a void.

“It’s a vice. I watch it every night and tape it again so I can watch it again on Sundays,” said Lovette Hernandez, a short-order cook at a downtown Miami restaurant. “There won’t be another soap like this one.”

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Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.