It's a good thing that, next season, ABC's "Ugly Betty" will be moving cast and crew from L.A. to New York City (where the show is set, after all), because it sure could use some kind of shot in the arm.

That's not to say the glossy comedy/soap opera has gone bad in season two. America Ferrera's unsung heroine Betty Suarez is as lovable and root-for-able as ever, and getting more so as she continues to stand up for herself in the shallow environment of Mode magazine.

Still, this enjoyable confection is starting to taste a little stale. This was immediately apparent upon its April 24 return after a long hiatus brought on by the writers strike.

"It seems like it's all over the place," says loyal viewer Eileen Reed of Wake Forest.

The doomed romance between Betty and her nerdy boyfriend Henry has dragged on too long, although it may have been resolved with last week's poignant episode that left heartbroken Betty staring at Henry and his newborn baby and likely future wife, Charlie. As a tear rolled down Betty's face, her family gathered around her in support.

Rather than finding the Betty/Henry plot too drawn out, Reed finds it too "far-fetched," and adds: "It's pretty fast-moving. It doesn't dwell on it. It's not like the soap operas where the phone rings on Friday, and on Monday, they answer it."

We agree, however, on one complaint: Writers seem at a loss about what to do with two of the show's campiest characters, Marc and Amanda.

The problem is that the former BFFs have split up. Back when they were together, they riffed off each other with spark. In some of their more touching moments, each gave the other comfort for the loneliness they masked with arrogance and fashion worship.

Over time, Michael Urie, the actor who plays Marc, proved especially likable for his comedic skills. Writers went in the direction of making the character more relatable and human, with mixed results.

"Last year, he had a boyfriend that I thought was real cute," Reed says. "I thought it was a nice story line. But then he disappeared."

Maybe it's because they couldn't reconcile that Marc with the one doing evil deeds on behalf of his villainous boss Wilhelmina.

So Marc is back to doing evil deeds for Wilhelmina, and that's it. It works well enough, thanks mostly to Urie, but it concedes creative failure.

Without Marc around, after he and Wilhelmina were exiled from Mode, Amanda the receptionist has become a total waste. Her amoral, party-girl, attention-junkie shtick has turned into extremely annoying filler, padded with unfunny one-liners. Her quest, earlier this season, to find her biological father -- who turned out to be Gene Simmons, ugh -- was the lamest excuse for a lame cameo ever.

When it comes to spoiled divas, give us Vanessa Williams' deliciously scheming Wilhelmina Slater. The best current plot is Wilhelmina's plan to regain her place in the Meade magazine empire by "giving birth" to the late Bradford Meade's baby through surrogate mom Christina McKinney, Mode magazine's Scottish dress designer.

"You know what I think?" Reed offers. "I don't think it's Bradford's baby. I think it's [the child of] the guy she married, the Scottish guy."

Good guess. And we both liked Wilhelmina's dramatic announcement to the Meade family in last Thursday's episode that she will be rejoining their family, like it or not. In grande diva style, she showed them an ultrasound image of the fetus on a big screen. Nice touch.

Mostly, though, even the show's eye-candy visuals -- the futuristic office, the clever morphing transitions between scenes -- have lost a bit of the "wow" factor by now. We've gotten spoiled and, maybe, so has this series. Some real New York location shots next season, rather than the computer-generated backgrounds the show has relied on so far, could go a long way in shaking up the show visually.

So go on to your rightful home in New York, "Ugly Betty." Maybe some of that scrappy attitude will rub off on you, too.

"Ugly Betty" airs 8 p.m. Thursdays on ABC, and two episodes are left this season.

'Battlestar' fans weigh in

Two weeks ago, I invited fans of Sci-Fi Channel's great "Battlestar Galactica" to predict which character will be revealed as the fifth Cylon in the "final five."

I got a lot of interesting responses, and I posted nearly all of them on the TV Eye blog at blogs.newsobserver.com/tv.

Most fans predicted that Vice President Tom Zarek, played by Richard Hatch of the original "Battlestar" series, will be outed as a Cylon.

I like that guess, but I doubt we'll find out the truth in the next episode, which airs Friday night at 10.

Does anyone else have the feeling we're going to be kept guessing for a while?