KEY POINTS:
The really brave thing about Ugly Betty (8.30 Tuesday, TV2) is not that Betty is ugly. She's not. She's a cartoon character - which means she's cute ugly, rather than ugly ugly.
She dresses like a cartoon character too, which means that she's bundled up in clashing technicolour coats (and a joke poncho) designed to make her look like the geek girl everyone picked on a school because she didn't know how to dress.
She has braces too, which add to the geek effect. But even with the braces she has a blinder of a smile.
Betty is the nice girl, the good girl, thrown, poncho first, into the magazine world which, as everyone knows, is where the uber-bitches ended up when they left school.
Some of the uber-bitches are men: gay, foppish personal assistants to the fashion queens and temperamental fashion photographers whose job in life is to make women look ridiculous.
The characters who inhabit this fashion mag world are cartoons, too. They may wear whatever they have decreed is fashion-forward at that nano-moment in fashion time, but they look at least as ridiculous as Betty.
In last week's pilot, the woman wearing the designer poncho - which led Betty to decide that her bright red number, with Guadalajara emblazoned across the front, was fashion - looked every bit as ridiculous as Betty.
A quibble about Betty's get-ups. She is supposed to be ugly but smart. She has been reading magazines her entire life.
She has a nephew who's addicted to fashion TV and a sister who is not entirely without fashion smarts, albeit in a slutty Queens sort of way.
She has eyes, even if they're framed by nerdy girl glasses. Presumably, she has a mirror. Surely she can see she looks like a freak?
But when you're making a cartoon, you don't need to bother with such subtleties.
Actually, beyond that quibble, the cartoonish aspect of Ugly Betty is what works best about it. It's the best way to parody the world of fashion, which is ugly and brutish and silly.
To make it a cartoon is the most effective way of satirising a place which takes itself so seriously.
Betty is the obvious outsider. The not-so-obvious outsider is her boss, Daniel Meade, who has been given the job of editing Mode because his father owns the publishing house.
And who has been given Betty as his PA, again by his father, because she's so ugly Daniel won't be tempted to bonk her.
By the end of the pilot, Daniel and Betty have bonded. They defeat the forces of evil - the uber-bitches - after Daniel is set up to fail with an ad campaign for the magazine's biggest client. That's the brave bit.
We've already had the entire story arc. Ugly outsider girl gets job with handsome outsider (nepotism has its downside).
He's beastly to her. She saves his bacon. He realises there's a big heart and a big brain behind that horrendous poncho. They're in this together.
Now what? More beastliness from the uber-bitches, I suspect. More silly outfits for Betty.
More triumphs of the ugly girl over the beauties. Which is just like a cartoon featuring a very unlikely superhero and his helper.
Come to think of it, Ugly Betty, kitted out in a too-tight red halter and thigh-high boots in last week's ritual humiliation scene did look a bit like a podgy Robin.
So far, it's sweet and likeable, and I'll watch again, if only to see what Betty gets to wear.
