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It’s the end of the Mode: ABC’s ‘Ugly Betty’ will wrap its run in April

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‘Ugly Betty’ has gone out of fashion.

ABC has decided not to continue the show beyond its current fourth season, Variety reports. The cast and crew were informed of the bad news this morning. The series finale will air in April.

With four episodes still left to produce, executive producer Silvio Horta said they will be able to send ‘Ugly Betty’ off in style.

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‘We’ve mutually come to the difficult decision to make this Ugly Betty’s final season, and are announcing now as we want to allow the show ample time to write a satisfying conclusion,’ Horta and ABC Entertainment Group chairman Steve McPherson said in a joint statement. ‘We are extremely proud of this groundbreaking series, and felt it was important to give the fans a proper farewell.”

The news is hardly shocking: After ratings began to cool during the show’s third season, ABC moved ‘Ugly Betty’ to Fridays last fall, where viewership plummeted. At the beginning of the year, the network gave the show a final chance to perform, sticking it on Wednesdays at 10 p.m. The last-ditch effort didn’t help. This season, “Betty” has averaged 5.3 million viewers, a big drop from the third season’s 8.1 million viewers.

In its later years, ‘Ugly Betty’ had toned down the outrageous storylines that had been its signature. When it premiered, the show was the surprise success of ABC’s 2006-07 fall lineup, creating buzz by scaling new melodramatic heights week after week. The series even won an Emmy for star America Ferrera. But the upkeep of the multiple super-soapy storylines soon became overwhelming, and Horta and ABC executives felt as though ‘Ugly Betty’s’ original conceit -- a Queens, N.Y., girl with journalism dreams works her way up from the bottom at cutthroat fashion-mag Mode -- had been lost in all the intrigue.

-- Denise Martin

Related:

‘Ugly Betty’s’ Identity Crisis

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