Los Angeles – Chop chop. If you want to watch Silvio Horta, creator of the new hit television show “Ugly Betty,” eat lunch, better be quick. He does it at his desk, while scrolling e-mail. Also? Watch your fingers. In comes the plastic tray of takeout sushi. Three minutes, four minutes, tops. Teka maki down the hatch. Lunch is over.
Horta is only 32 years old, with the most-watched new series of the fall season, which ABC just announced it is picking up for the full season. Outwardly, Horta does not appear to be suffering from the stress of creating 42 minutes and 30 seconds of quality television a week for 22 weeks.
“I’ve only lost 10 pounds,” he says. He wears leather loafers without socks and his briefcase is a backpack he’s had since college. He looks a little Tom Cruisey. Sleeping? “Not much,” he says. But Horta isn’t complaining. These are exactly the kinds of problems you want in television.
Initially, his one-hour soapy “fish out of water” comedy – about a zafty Latina from Queens with the furry eyebrows working at a snooty fashion magazine in Manhattan – was going to air on Friday nights, a time slot of comfortably low expectations in the TV week, the second-least-watched night, after the graveyard that is Saturday evening.
“It was going to be this nice little Friday night show,” Horta says. “The pressure wasn’t going to be so heavy. People liked it. OK. Fine. Then it showed at the TCA.”
Horrors. That’s the semiannual gathering of the Television Critics Association, whose members were shown an early version of the pilot – and they raved. The ABC executives smelled a hit and shoved “Ugly Betty” into the spotlight at 7 p.m. Thursdays (KMGH-Channel 7, opposite “Survivor.”
“It was hold on, here we go,” Horta says. “It was like all your dreams come true.”
Not that his life is stress-free.
“You always have these moments of panic,” he says. “It could become overwhelming. But you ask yourself, what are my priorities?” He doesn’t mean family, health, God, love. He means: The script, the set, the cast, the director, the music, or the newspaper reporter following you around? “What is the most important thing I need to focus on right now, and then that is what you do.”
To say that Horta is the creator of “Ugly Betty” is technically correct: He developed and wrote the pilot. He imagined the look and feel, what is known in TV talk as the show’s “bible.” But ABC’s “Ugly Betty” is based on a wildly popular Colombian telenovela from 1999 called “Yo Soy Betty La Fea,” which was a blockbuster in Latin America and has since been spun off into successful soap series in India, Germany, Russia, Greece, Spain and Israel (where it became “Ugly Esti”).
The actress Salma Hayek and the producer Ben Silverman (“The Office”) owned the rights in the United States and were struggling to develop a series when they approached Horta.
“Their energy was infectious,” Horta says of Hayek and Silverman.”And creatively we were all on the same page – telling the story of Betty as a young woman straddling these worlds, trying to make her way in the American world, the gringo world, as this first-generation Latina and this ugly duckling.”
If you haven’t been watching, the ugly duckling is America Ferrera (seen in films “Real Women Have Curves” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”), and TV critics essentially agree that she is the soul of the show. Her Betty Suarez is a plucky, plump, good-hearted recent community college grad from the outer boroughs with adult braces who is thrown into a viper pit crawling with fashion-crazed stick people.
So to review: “Ugly Betty” is a reimagined Colombian soap opera starring a Honduran American actress who plays a Mexican American in a series created by Silvio Horta, a Cuban American.
Horta tells a story about how he and his colleagues obsessed for days on the font of the cover lines of Mode, the ersatz fashion magazine in the series.
On television, unlike in the movies, the audience is infinitely distractible, and so a show has to keep sucking them in. Of course, a winning series has to have a good story, blah, blah, blah. But that’s only the beginning. These people massage each little beat, each couplet of dialogue, from the teaser to the tag, and then they fill in “Ugly Betty” with layer upon layer of visual and aural candy. “We treat the clothes,” Horta says, “as seriously as the characters.”
One of the reasons why Hayek and Silverman wanted Horta for “Ugly Betty” is because he grew up in Betty’s world. Not in a Mexican household in New York, but a Cuban one in Florida.
Horta’s parents came from the island to Miami in 1969 and little Silvio was born in 1974. “My parents, my mom, barely speaks English,” he says. His mother worked as a cashier in grocery stores. His father was a guitar player in house bands in local clubs. His folks divorced when Silvio was 6.
Like many first-generation Latinos, Horta was both appalled and mesmerized by telenovelas, the TV novels his mother was addicted to.
These are mostly Spanish-language imports, airing on stations such as Telemundo and Univision, that resemble our American daytime soap operas, but are more like melodramatic miniseries with a limited run.
The schedule is crazy. It’s less Amtrak, more NASA. Many shuttles to launch. The team is outlining plots, writing scripts, casting actors, selecting music to film an episode, while simultaneously editing, reediting, adding music and credits to episodes already shot.
Throughout the entire process, both the production company, Touchstone Television, and the network, ABC, are shown and are approving everything, offering a constant stream of “notes.” “You have to use both sides of your brain,” Horta explains. Or, if you don’t? He thinks that’s funny.
“At the end of the day the most important thing is the scripts,” Horta says. “You’ve got to have one a week and it’s got to be great.
“It’s a million decisions a day. You know it’s not always black and white,” Horta says, getting almost philosophical. “It’s a lot of decisions with a lot of gray.”
