TVSquad

Salma Hayek, who produces ABC's Ugly Betty, says that fans shouldn't expect her to reprise her roles of Sofia and the nurse in the telenovela the Suarez family watch.

Hayek appeared in six episodes of the show's first season as Sofia Reyes and in one episode as the nurse, an uncredited role. Sofia was a newcomer to the Mode scene and was in charge of a new magazine. The character ended up being romantically tied to Daniel Meade but things didn't end happily for him after he learned some of Sofia's secrets.

Salma Hayek, apparently hoping to duplicate the success of Ugly Betty, which she produced with partner Jose Tamez, is developing another telenovela, an untitled medical drama based at an Ivy League university. Joe Sachs, a writer and producer on ER, is also executive producing the show along with Hayek and Tamez.

Given the television industries knack for jumping on any bandwagon once it's proved there's an audience for it, one wonders what will happen if this new drama becomes as successful as Ugly Betty. It could be we're not too far away from a slew of shows all adapted from telenovelas and other foreign series. I saw a show on Univision the other day where a man dressed as a pink gorilla was chased by another man dressed as a baby. I think that would translate well to an American audience.

(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.