Pi-Consulting

The Washington Post’s annual American “What’s Out – What’s In” report for 2007 has plenty to interest us social and attitudinal trend-watchers, starting with sexual mores and self-indulgence. Away with abstinence. Welcome back, pre-marital sex! Goodbye to driving drunk. Try driving nude instead! If you must wear clothes, pull your jeans up to waist-level; that off-the-butt look is now hopelessly old-fashioned. Out goes the ex-urbs McMansion. Now it’s a Designer Prefab in the “rur-urbs”. And so it goes on….

Perhaps the most striking switch is in TV audience allegiances. “America’s Next Top Model” becomes America’s “so-last-year” yawn. Who needs beauty? Make way for “Ugly Betty”! The eponymous heroine of this blazing new super-soap wears googy red spectacle frames, awful bangs and metal braces on her teeth that rival a barbed-wire fence for sheer rampant sex-appeal. It takes several hours in make-up to “uglify” the actress who plays poor Betty. (She’s actually very beautiful, natch, as wincing audiences will find out in later episodes).

How does Pi know this? Because we’ve seen the whole series already – in Spanish! The show originated as a brilliantly-written soap-opera (or telenovela) in Colombia, under the title “Betty la Fea”, or Betty the Ugly. Now it’s America’s turn to gasp in horror at how cruel nature can be to the female form, and to await the transforming happy ending, many episodes in the future. Oh, and she gets the guy. (Source: Washington Post, Pi Market Research)