Understanding Screen Franchising

Handbooks about the business practice of franchising do not seem to consider whether the practice occurs in television and other media industries. This lack of regard is replicated by media and communication scholars who fail to consider how this kind of media licensing works, even though the term franchising' is frequently adopted. To place the topic in a wider realm of critical inquiry, this article analyses a set of distinct economic, legal and cultural parameters that have to do with media intertext franchising on the one hand and television format franchising on the other. It finds that the two sets of practices operate under different regimes of legal protection, one concentrating on trade mark law and the other focusing on copyright law. In turn, this raises a question concerning the legal protectability of television program formats such as Ugly Betty under a legal shield associated with the media intertext rather than the television format. The presence of dramatic character would seem to be crucial to facilitating the building of a brand associated with a fictional character's aura or image.

Fealdad, alteridad y representación de la población latina en Estados Unidos en el discurso televisivo de Ugly Betty

En este artículo analizamos la transformación de las representaciones de la población latina en Estados Unidos en la teleserie Ugly Betty, a través de una perspectiva sociológica y semiótica. Concluimos que dicha transformación constituye una ruptura importante en materia de la adaptación de géneros mediáticos y también una representación cultural más compleja de dicha población en la sociedad estadounidense.

Identifying Ugliness, Defining Beauty: A Focus Group Analysis of and Reaction to Ugly Betty

This article discusses the ideological construct “beauty” that permeates our society by focusing specifically on socially constructed ideals of beauty and ugliness as they are represented in media text, specifically, in the TV sitcom Ugly Betty. For this study we conducted focus group interview sessions to explore the influence an alternative representation of beauty and ugliness, as portrayed in the show Ugly Betty, has on college aged females’ definition and interpretation of beauty—typically questions explored using traditional experimental and other quantitative methods. Moreover, this study provides insights into tensions surrounding how beauty and ugliness are defined and the implications of these definitions for women.