Genre

Ugly Betty belongs to a number of different genres, this is normally known as hybrid genre. Hybrid genre is a cross between one film genre and another.

One genre Ugly Betty falls into is comedy-drama, comedy-drama also known as dramedy, is a style of television or movies where there is an equal balance, or nealry equal balance of humour and seriouness. In a comedy you always have stereotypical conventions, in a comedy there is always a humourous character, in this case it's Marc st James (Marcus Weiner). Marc is portrayed as a bisexual- interested in men, gay men are sterotypically seen to have feminine characteristics, such as bitchy, cunning. sweet and interested in their looks. Even though Marc is a funny character there are serious issues attached to him, seriousness is a convention of drama's and Marc has the issue of telling his family that he is bisexual.

Other characters are also portrayed in this way such as Betty who is quite humourous because of her appearance and because of the things she does (clumsiness) and when she walks straight into a glass on her first day at work. She then has a serious side to her to, which is issues with her boyfriend.

The second genre that Ugly Betty consists of is Romance. Typical conventions of a love story is always girl meets boy, girl falls in love with boy, someone gets in between the two, they get back together after they overcome the obstacles and then they live happily ever after. But this is not always the case in Ugly Betty. Betty, who already is in a relationship with Henry begins to fall for her work colleaugue Walter, Walter already has a grilfriend namely Charlie. When Betty expresses her love for Walter, Charlie becomes an obstacle and announces that she is pregnant with Walters baby. The sterotypical ending in a romantic programme/film is that they all live happily ever after, but after watching the final episode it is made quite clear that this is not the case. It is made obvious that Betty goes through a makeover and gets with her boss instead.