Kamogelo Molatlhoe as Betty and Vanessa
Betty's back on SABC1 on Monday 6 March for Season 3 of uBettina Wethu, which is now airing in a new timeslot of 21h00, still from Mondays to Wednesdays.
The season features another 52 episodes of adventures for one of TVs most reincarnated characters.
Someone who knows all about Betty's life, both in South Africa and abroad, is head writer Vanessa Jansen who's been at the helm of our South African series since Season 1.
TVSA caught up with her recently and this is what we discovered...
The heart of the matter
The uBettina writing team consists of Vanessa and six writers who work around a theme for each season, which they refer to as a central value.
Vanessa fills us in, with the scoop:
Vanessa: In Season 1, the central theme, playing on some pop culture metaphors, was "Betty takes Joburg".
So, the idea of this girl from outside the main city coming into the city and being faced with all the challenges that come with that, but basically conquering and showing people that even though she doesn't look like them, even if she doesn't look as glamorous or come from that world, she's just as capable.
And then, in Season 2, it was Betty getting deeper into the world of Nubia.
I'm trying to think of... we had a catchphrase for it, I think it was, "The Rise of Betty," or something like that, because it was her now climbing the corporate ladder and getting new experience - she gets promoted in the second season. She's shining in this world.
Betty manages to get shares in the company so there's this meteorical rise in Season 2 of Betty shining.
With Season 3, we've called it messy, we've called it crazy, it's intense on many levels because Betty gets all the things that she wants but just not the thing that she needs.
She's driven by a goal and a motivation, but that's not necessarily what's going to bring her the biggest fulfilment.
So, we kind of give her her dream but she's getting the experience of understanding, obviously, that all that glitters is not gold.
*Laughs*
She's already made MD very soon into the season because she has the shares, because Linda trusts her, because Dingaan has been struggling to run the business.
She gets quickly elevated into a more powerful position, but now of course she has to deal with the reality of what managers and shareholders have to deal with.
She has to worry about salaries, she has to worry about payments and the kind of notion that she's now in management and she has these friends who are not.
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Flash fact:
Season 3 is mid-way through the series as a whole.
The production plans to do two more seasons, which will bring the story to a conclusion because it's a telenovela, which means it should have a beginning, middle and end.
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To laugh or to cry, that is the question
Filming the Season 1 finale
Vanessa takes us behind-the-scenes:
Vanessa: We constantly review what we've done and try to improve it. The genre is a very difficult one actually because while it's a rom-com, we kind of lean more into a dramedy so that it's not all just frivolous, light hearted love things but that there's a drama behind it as well.
One of our biggest challenges has been balancing the humour and the drama, finding the ways to get both of those tonalities in, and every season we swivel with a different approach, to see if can get better comedy out of it. *Laughs*
Or better drama.
My brief to the writers is always either make us laugh or make us cry, but make a choice and take us down that road when you're writing.
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Flash Fact:
The season's available on Viu again, in the Premium section.
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Camera pans to supporting characters
Khaya Jali (Director of Photography) and Sean O’Sullivan (1st Assistant Director)
What will we see on Season 3 that's different from Season 2?
Vanessa: Season 3's dynamics... one of the challenges we had in the beginning was, well the feedback we got from channel and different places is that we were very much in the professional world of brand management and media.
And, you know, that wasn't necessarily where we wanted the focus to be. The professional stuff is always there because it's always interpreting Betty's journey in that space but I think the feeling was that we get too stuck into the professional world.
We've always had smaller stories running, that deal with the support characters in Betty's world, but what we've done in Season 3 is that we've created worlds inside those stories.
We go into different spaces and tell very intimate stories about characters that we wouldn't necessarily see in the main space and I think that's been a really exciting part of Season 3, peeling back some of the layers.
Our Brandon character is kind of a chauvinist kind of guy, he's a bit of a bully, and in Season 3 we spend some time with him as he falls in love and get to understand why he is the way he is, what has led him to be this person.
You find out about his background and his childhood and I think that creates a little bit more emphasis for the character.
We've done that with a couple of the other stories as well. We've got a beautiful story for our matriarch Linda as well.
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Flash fact:
The writing team starts their process by watching episodes from the original series to ensure they retain its essence. They use Telemundo's Betty in New York because it's the most recent series before ours.
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Improvise!
Lunga Shabalala as Dingaan
Another big change for Season 3 is that the actors have more scope to ad-lib their lines.
Vanessa reveals the secret that you wouldn't know when you watch:
Vanessa: What was happening on Season 2 was that the actors were bringing all sorts of ad-lib to the party and we've got a wonderful bunch of actors - they've got such a wonderful sensibility of the characters to the point that they're able to ad-lib.
In Season 2 we had challenges in editing because there was the story and there were these wonderful little ad-libs but there's only so many minutes we can put on air so this season, one of the big things we also did, is that we actually shortened what we wrote on the page to allow more room for the actors to ad-lib.
It's a bit risky obviously because someone might say something that changes the story or changes the tone, but we do big briefing sessions with the actors and tell them what their arcs are for the season and we do briefing sessions with the HODs so that they know what they need to be considering in the long run, so everyone's clued up on what they're doing.
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