The Beauty in "Ugly Betty"

Heather Havrilesky delivers with poetic rhythm.

She’s sharp, with an alliterative style to match the sound of her name.

She's seemingly most interested in the human condition.

Havrilesky is far less formal in her personal blog than when writing for salon.com, but one can almost see how the fore leads to the latter, with extracted thoughts and snippets of ideas left on the page to make way for her next assignment.

photographer unknown

By ZOË MARKWALTER as HEATHER HAVRILESKY

The fact that her braces are large, she’s curvaceous (Real Women Have Curves), and her clothing pattern palette is louder than Duran Duran or Dusty Springfield on one of their comeback tours, doesn’t by default make Betty Suarez (America Ferrera) ugly – unless of course, you ask Amanda Tanen (Becki Newton). While Amanda is not entirely bad, she certainly maintains a Cher Horowitz-esque (Alicia Silverstone in Clueless) shallow distain for the neglected laws of couture, holding no fashion forward punches with regard to Betty’s personal style choices.

Amanda: What is the first thing I ever said to you?

Betty: Are you the 'before'?

Amanda: Okay, the second thing?

Betty: [gesturing in faux sign language] "Are you de-li-ver-ing something?

Amanda: Whatever

With earnest novella-istic technique, Ugly Betty manages to deliver genuine shallowness with genuine depth and compassionate insight. As the show’s focus splits between her family home in Queens and her publishing office at MODE Magazine, there’s no shortage of disparate world collisions, and her nephew Justin (Mark Indelicato) is the one to draw the spheres together with his melodic mastery of Broadway hits, chic self-presentation, and effeminate ambiguity.

Betty is first generation Mexican American, and in classic stereotypical style, she and her borough-appropriately tacky single-mother sister Hilda (Ana Ortiz), live at home with Justin and their immigrant dad Ignacio (Tony Plana), who cooks homemade dinners for them while dodging the INS. There is no shortage of love – or hate – in the Suarez house.

Ignacio: Hilda, you were out with Santos. I heard you climb the drain pipe. Did he at least walk you to it and give you a boost?

Hilda: You never let up, God I hate this house! I'm so out of here when I'm fourty!

With characters like co-Editors in Chief Daniel Meade (Eric Mabius) and Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams), this dramedy is lavish with shallow chauvinism and divarazzi discrimination. Yet through genuine self-identifying humor, Betty ushers her frienemies’ semi-conversions to egalitarian ethics while wistfully dreaming of her own transition from fashion magazine mogle’s assistant, to true journalistic legitimacy as Editor in Chief of a socially responsible publication of her own one day. "This concealer here, this isn't gonna change the fact that she doesn't have a house. And this-this eyeliner isn't going to bring back the people you loved. These women have lost everything and there is not enough styling gel in here to change that!"