Interview with "Ugly Betty'"s Silvio Horta

Then in the second season, the fussy, fashionable Marc acquired an unlikely boyfriend in the form of Cliff (David Blue), a decidedly unfashionable gay man. Unfortunately, due to the writers’ strike which shut down Hollywood for 100 days, Marc and Cliff’s relationship didn’t receive the screentime initially planned. But Horta assures gay fans Cliff will be back. “We have a couple of episodes we want to start using him again. We really want to use him and see him with Marc when we devote more than a couple of lines to him in the background. David Blue is great and I love that character and the writers and the audience love him. We want to play out that relationship in a real way. We want to push things again and see how far we can go with the two of them.”

David Blue and Michael Urie on Ugly Betty, Mark Indelicato
Photo credit: ABC Studios/Wire Image/Gary Gershoff

What does Horta mean by “push them” exactly? “How do I portray this relationship really honestly? We have a sort of unlikely fairytale where these two guys have found each other and they’re an unlikely couple and now they are together. Then what? What are going to be the pitfalls, the dangers to this relationship as they grow and evolve?”

Horta also plans for Marc, thus far mostly Wilhelmina's conniving henchman, to grow and evolve. “One of the things we’ve been talking about is getting to Marc’s goals and ambitions. We’ve played him as Wilhelmina’s lackey and sycophant and he’s always at her side. Then we started to dimensionalize him when we brought in his mom and we brought in Cliff. Now part of it is what does Marc really want to do with his life? There are going to be bigger ambitions than just giving Wilhelmina foot rubs. There has to be more that he wants to do. We’re really delving into that.”

Might Marc’s growth include the return of his homophobic mother played so memorably by Patti LuPone? Horta hinted there might be. “There is an episode I want to write at some point in the season where she comes back. I don’t want to say anything for sure.”

Michael Urie and Patti LuPone
Photo credit: ABC Studios

Ugly Betty’s second season wasn’t received quite so rapturously by either critics or viewers, something that didn’t go unnoticed by Horta. Nor does he entirely disagree with them. Said Horta, “A lot of people say ‘that first season was so nice, it was so great’… [but] there were some episodes that weren’t my favorite. They said the second season there was a slump and it started to veer off – yeah, I agree to a degree, but we also did a lot of really great stuff. I don’t think it’s black and white.”

And the writers’ strike certainly didn’t help. As Horta explained, “You start off a season, you put these plots in motion and you knock this out and you go. You can’t stop. There are shooting dates coming and there are production dates and you have to see things through it.”

But the writers’ strike put an abrupt end to that, only to suddenly be settled thereby forcing shows to rush back into production to salvage what they could of the season. But Horta doesn’t make excuses and acknowledges that Betty somewhat lost its focus due in part to its large cast of characters.

“We are very ambitious," said Horta. "You go in a writers’ and room and you start putting these stories down for these characters and you realize you only have forty two minutes thirty seconds in an episode to tell all these stories. And so Betty, who is the leader of the show and this is her point of view and suddenly she only had two minutes of screen time per act and it became much more truncated and we had way too many storylines and she wasn’t part of it.”

Possible missteps aside, Horta’s handling of Ugly Betty has been so strong that at this summer’s Television Critics Association tour, ABC chose Horta to appear on a showrunner’s panel alongside Desperate Housewives’ Marc Cherry, Brothers & Sisters and Eli Stones’ Greg Berlanti, Grey’s Anatomy’s Shonda Rhimes, and Lost’s Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, creators of some of the most influential television shows of the past five years.