Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: ‘Oh Betty, You’re So Beautiful’ Janet McCabe The Whole World’s Unlikely Heroine: Ugly Betty as Transnational Phenomenon Michele Hilmes Our Betty: The Legacy of Yo soy Betty, la fea’s Success in Colombia Yeidy M. Rivero Interview with Jeff Ford on the purchase of Ugly Betty for Channel 4 Jean Chalaby Interviews with TV Executives involved in the German Adaptation, Verliebt in Berlin Andrea Esser Betty and Lisa: Alternating Between Sameness and Uniqueness Bianca Lippert Ugly Betty, Flemish Sara: Telenovela Adaptation and Generic Expectations Alexander Dhoest and Manon Mertens Re-Creating Betty’s World in SpainStefania Carini Towards a Cultural Economy of Chou Nu (Nv) Wu Di: The Ugly Betty franchise in the People’s Republic of China Coco Xiaolu Ma and Albert Moran How Ugly Can Betty Be in India? Divya D. McMillin Ugly Betty on Turkish Television: Updating Popular Cinema Laurence Raw Esti Ha'mechoeret: The Israeli Ugly Betty Amit Lavie-Dinur and Yuval Karniel The Greek Maria The Ugly: The Never-Ending Journey of a Myth Betty Kaklamanidou Czech Ugly Katka: Global Homogenization and Local Invention Irena Carpentier Reifová and Zden?k Sloboda Glamorously (Post) Soviet: Reading Yo soy Betty, la fea in Russia Elena Prokhorova Traveling Narratives and Transitional Life Strategies: Yo soy Bea and Ugly Betty Paul Julian Smith Our Betties, Ourselves Dana Heller

Promotional Information

Premiering in 2006, the award winning US hit show "Ugly Betty", is an incarnation of a global phenomenon that started as a Colombian telenovela, "Yo soy Betty, la fea", back in 1999. This book about how television formats go global asks what the "Betty" phenomenon can tell us about the international circulation of locally produced TV fictions.

About the Author

Janet McCabe is Honorary Research Fellow in TV Drama at Birkbeck, University of London. She is author of The West Wing and Feminist Film Studies. She has co-edited collections on contemporary US television including Reading Sex and the City and Quality TV: Contemporary American TV and Beyond (2007,both I.B.Tauris). She is a co-founding editor as well as managing editor of Critical Studies in Television journal. Along with Kim Akass, she is series editor of Tauris' Reading Contemporary Television series. Kim Akass is Lecturer in Cultural and Contextual Studies (Film and TV),University of Hertfordshire. Among the books in contemporary television she has co-edited are Reading Six Feet Under (2005),and Quality TV:Contemporary American TV and Beyond 2007,both I.B.Tauris). She is the author of Telematernity: Watching Mothers on Television I.B.Tauris forthcoming).She is a co-founding editor and managing editor of Critical Studies in Television,as well as series editor,with Janet McCabe,of Reading Contemporary Television series.

Reviews

'This terrific and timely collection's distinct focus on the Yo soy Betty,la fea phenomenon allows for an impressively expansive inquiry into contemporary television and global popular culture.' Tasha Oren, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee