Building 'Betty'

Silverman and Hayek liked the way Horta handled the script for "Westside" -- what a TV person might call his "tonality," his use of humor with a lot of heart. Horta had a track record, too, having created two previous shows (now canceled): the sci-fi "Jake 2.0" for UPN and the horror comedy "The Chronicle" for Sci Fi.

"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 two 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.

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Horta is brushing his hand through the dark tresses of America Ferrera's newly created wig as the mass of Big Hair is held aloft like a cornered raccoon by one of the show's stylists in the makeup trailer at Raleigh Studios. "Nice," says Horta. One of his fellow producers, Teri Weinberg, who works for Silverman, is nodding. "Very nice," she purrs.

You might think: Hmmm, what is Horta doing with the wig guy, but after chasing Horta around the studio for a few hours, you see that the job of creator-slash-executive producer is to view the smallest detail as part of the job. "Trust me," Horta says. "I've had many a hair conversation."

Understand that the wig is huge. In the show, details are paramount.

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." He approves the wig.

Before he heads back to the set, Horta runs back to his office for about seven minutes to sit in front of his Mac. Until you really deconstruct a show like "Ugly Betty," you may not realize how much music there is. There is no laugh track. Every scene begins, ends, transitions, rises, falls with little snips of music, a chorus of constant cues to reinforce emotion. Happy. Sad. Pathos. Sex. Giggles. Rumba! Horta's music supervisor, Frankie Pine, just e-mailed him some song samples they might use to heighten a few-second scene that was shot in a set dressed to look like a New York nightclub.

Horta clicks his mouse. He is a left-hander.

First song: "Too distracting."