TVSquad

If you had the return of Ugly Betty in your datebook -- or PDA -- for Friday, October 9, it's time for an update. ABC has moved the season premiere of Ugly Betty to October 16. It'll be a double shot of Betty, two-hours instead of just one. After the premiere, Ugly Betty will fall into its regular slot of Friday at 9 p.m.

Unfortunately, a double dose of Ugly Betty won't be enough to pump up the ratings. ABC isn't doing Betty any favor by plunking it on Friday nights when there are less people watching TV. Sure, there are lower expectations, but what does it say about the network's faith in the show? Why not just put it on Saturday when even less viewers tune in? (What happened to programming for Saturday night anyway? Once upon a time, great shows actually thrived on Saturdays!)

When Lipstick Jungle comes back for the new season on Wednesday, September 24, we already know that Wendy's life will be impacted by the appearance of her challenging, iconic mother Joyce, played by television great Mary Tyler Moore.

Now comes news via E! Online that things will be getting more complicated for the Lipstick Jungle with the addition of two more name stars; Latino talents Carlos Ponce and Rosie Perez are both booked for guest roles.

Did you know that baseball players are big-time soap opera fans? It's true. All that time they spend hanging out in the clubhouse during the day, they have the soaps playing in the background. Not all, but a lot. That said, it'll be interesting to see if the same things that sell soaps -- the drama, the relationships, the never-ending stories -- work for ESPN in selling their Fantasy Baseball League. They're calling the series of commercials "Endless Drama."

(S02E13) "Spencer, thank God you're here! Now go home." -- Detective Lassiter to Shawn

Even though it may sound crazy, one of the things I like about Psych is that it actually has an opening credits sequence complete with a theme song -- something that is extremely rare in this era of maximum exposure. While that may sound mundane at first, it actually gives the show a bit of extra character. It can also be used to set the tone of an episode, as well.

Ben Silverman has made his first major deal as programming head at NBC: he has bought a TV show about breasts.

Yup. Silverman bought the rights to the Colombian telenovela Sin tetas no hay paraiso, which means Without Breasts There Is No Paradise. That has always been a mantra for many guys but I didn't know they had made a televison show out of it. It is being developed as a show for NBC and also NBC-owned Telemundo.

The show is described as being about "a young woman who is determined to get bigger breasts in order to escape poverty."

I smell a number one hit show.

(S01E24) I can't stop crying.

The numbers are in and The Riches is off to a nice start for FX. The 3.8 million viewers more than doubled the best Monday night at 10 the network has ever had. That was also slightly better than the premieres of Nip/Tuck and Dirt, but fell short of The Shield, Rescue Me, and Over There. In the 18-49 demo, the news was even better. The Riches ranks as the number two premiere, trailing only The Shield.

Of course, it remains to be seen how things hold up moving forward. I thought the premiere was very good, but it didn't match the advertising that led up to it. The show had a much darker, more serious tone than those commercials where we saw Wayne and Dahlia walking down the stairs pondering their new life. I'll be interested to see if that turned off any of those 3.8 million viewers.

(S01E12) And, so, Salma Hayek's arc comes to an end. We'll miss you, Salma. We'll miss you and your ripe, luscious... acting ability. Sofia broke Daniel's heart, and he's gone off the sadness end. Ted broke Wilhelmina's heart, and she's gone off the bitchy end. It's not going to be pretty at Mode, and will Betty even be back? She quit MYW, but doesn't Amanda have her old job at Mode? With Daniel gone, who is going to take Betty back? All this heartbreak, and I'm worried about Betty's paycheck. Just goes to show you where my sympathies lie.

Here's an example of how dense I can be sometimes: I had no idea that the lead in Ugly Betty was played by America Ferrera. I don't actually watch the show, so I guess I can be forgiven a little, but I've always thought Ferrera was cute so I'm surprised I didn't figure it out sooner. Then again, maybe that would be considered a compliment since she transforms herself so well into the role of an "ugly" person. It's not like she's Rachel Leigh Cook in She's All That who slips on a pair of glasses and still looks hot but we're supposed to accept she's a hideous nerd that no boy would want. I only wish the nerdy chicks in my high school looked like that.

Oh yeah, and Ugly Betty is on iTunes now. The first season is available, and new episodes can be downloaded the day after they air. Episodes are $1.99.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, MyNetwork is considering scrapping its current all-telenovela programming. The network is a Fox creation to keep WB/UPN affiliates alive after the networks merged to create The CW. MyNetwork debuted in September and it airs thirteen hours of dramas, five days a week, with recaps on Saturdays. The first two telenovelas on MyNetwork are Fashion House, starring the very plastic Bo Derek and the equally plastic Morgan Fairchild, and Desire, which each averaged a measly .7 rating in their first thirteen weeks on the air. New drama Wicked Wicked Games, starring Tatum O'Neal, and others have rated poorer than that since they debuted earlier this month.

Does anybody watch the telenovelas on MyNetwork? I hear the promos for them all the time on the radio and they sound so terrible... and not good terrible but just terrible terrible.

It's official and, perhaps, a bit ironic. The show with the hottest cast on television is Ugly Betty. Gentlemen, there will be no need to despair when Salma Hayek's character arc has come and gone. Rebecca Romijn will be holding the va-va-va-voom quotient steady at the Mode offices.

Romijn has been cast to play the "mystery woman" that Wilhelmina has been conspiring with to take over the magazine. We have no reason to think that this "mystery woman" is anyone other than Mode's back-from-the-dead editor Fey, but it's a soap opera. If the show's own press releases insist on referring to her only as the "mystery woman," than we'll humor them. We've already seen the character Romijn will be playing on the show, but she's been covered in surgical gauze and shot in silhouette. A different actress has been providing the character's voice. My assumption has always been that Wilhelmina's conspirator was much older than Romijn, which just goes to show the wonders of reconstructive surgery.

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.

A highlight of each Ugly Betty episode is our momentary glimpse of Ignacio's favorite telenovela Vidas de Fuego (Lives of Fire). Starting Thursday, you'll be able to see the full mini-telenovela in a series of six webisodes at ABC.com. Vidas de Fuego is the first in a series of two online telenovelitas that will be offered by ABC in connection with Ugly Betty.

If you haven't been able to piece together Vidas de Fuego's plot just yet, here's the deal. Vidas de Fuego is set on the cattle ranch of the wealthy Rivera family. Sofia Rivera is seducing her stepson Galo in order to gain control of the family's fortune. Meanwhile, the gorgeous maid is pregnant by her secret lover - the local priest. Who will gain control of the family's empire? Will the priest's cover be blown? Is that really his baby? Dios mio!

(S01E08) This show has so many great moments and is so confident in its candy-colored, postmodern style that you can almost overlook the shortcomings of its less than stellar episodes. I should qualify that comment by saying that Ugly Betty's "less than stellar" is akin to any other show's "home run." The bar's just that high, dreamgirls.

Ugly Betty is a hybrid - part "center and eccentrics" dramedy with America Ferrera as its heart and part telenovela. Most of the criticisms I read about the show revolve around the series being too much telenovela and not enough Betty or vice versa. I've got no problem with the hybrid form, but it does lay at the heart at what I thought was this episode's weakness - balance.

(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.