It’s easy for a young woman making her way in the big city to get lost. Just ask Betty Suarez.
As its second season wore on, “Ugly Betty,” which follows the awkward but winning Queens, New York, native Betty (America Ferrera) as she navigates the dangerous waters of the Manhattan fashion world, veered further away from the things that had made it such a roaring success.
The plots were too numerous, too repetitive and sometimes overly outlandish (yes, even for this frequently arch soap). The show’s mixture of sly humor and earnest sweetness took a back seat to frenetic plots and predictable, often irritating, supporting characters. One story line involving Betty’s choice between two suitors seemed to go on forever.
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“We lost Betty’s point of view,” said Silvio Horta, “Ugly Betty” executive producer and creator of the U.S. version of the series. “We kept adding layers and layers to the cake.”
But just as the writers were making many poststrike course corrections — Thursday’s episode (7 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7) is the most enjoyable and least frantic “Ugly Betty” outing in some time — news broke that the production would be leaving Los Angeles.
Last week, the cast and crew were told that, thanks to favorable tax legislation that makes it cheaper to film in New York, the third season of “Ugly Betty” would be produced there.
Horta said that despite the move, all of “Ugly Betty’s” regular cast members will be part of the third season. (Though for creative reasons unrelated to the move, Rebecca Romijn’s Alexis will be a recurring character next season.)
“They’re all moving; they’re all excited, some more than others,” Horta said. “People who have families — it’s a little more difficult. But by and large, they’re excited about it.”
The move will make it easier to shoot scenes in Betty’s Queens neighborhood. Using authentic New York locations excites Horta, but he said he and his writing staff have a much bigger goal in Season 3: to make the show more about Betty’s journey and to weave the characters into more unified, emotionally grounded plots.
Even the guest arc of Lindsay Lohan, who will appear in six upcoming episodes, was designed with a Betty-centric purpose in mind.
“The mantra now is, we will only do [a guest arc] in so far as it illuminates our characters and the relationships between our main characters,” Horta said.
Lohan, who will be glimpsed in a flashback scene in the May 22 finale, was a “mean girl” at Betty’s high school whose life didn’t turn out very well. “She and Betty run into each other,” Horta said, and next season Lohan’s character is “going to rebond with Betty, and things are going to be different — but things are going to go a little bit awry,” as they usually do in the magazine assistant’s world.
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For more from Horta, go to chicagotribune.com/watcher.