The Face Outside the Frame

That is the welcome tension in Ugly Betty, which premieres on ABC on September 28, 2006. America Ferrera plays Betty Suarez, an aspiring magazine worker whose appearance fails the test administered by the fashion world around her. The show puts the person being judged at its center. It also raises a less comfortable question: if she cannot qualify through beauty, must she compensate with an exceptional personality?

The job comes with a judgment

In his September 27 preview for USA Today, Robert Bianco describes Betty as a smart, kind young woman from Queens who wants to work at a serious magazine and instead becomes an assistant at the glossy fashion publication Mode. Her employer's reasoning is not a victory for meritocracy. Magazine owner Bradford Meade wants an assistant his playboy son Daniel will not find attractive, so Daniel can concentrate on work.

Betty's appearance is therefore not incidental to her hiring. It is being put to work for somebody else. She enters the office already carrying a judgment about what she can and cannot be to the man in charge.

There is a nasty precision to that setup. The supposedly unsuitable face becomes suitable for a subordinate role, provided it helps manage the boss. Betty gets the opportunity, but the opportunity does not prove that anyone has learned to see her clearly.

The comedy can expose this without pretending the office is a realistic sample of workplaces. Bianco describes broad stereotypes, exaggerated behavior and cartoon colors. This is a fashion fairy tale, not a study of hiring discrimination. Its usefulness lies in making the bargain visible.

The charm surcharge

Bianco praises Ferrera's performance and notes that jokes at Betty's expense are countered by scenes emphasizing her worth and spirit. The audience is offered reasons to care about the person her colleagues dismiss.

That reversal matters. A woman treated as the wrong sort of person for the picture becomes the person through whom the picture makes sense. Betty also has a family life: Bianco describes her father, sister and fashion-loving nephew. The office's verdict is no longer the only account of who she is.

But a sympathetic reversal can preserve the original test in a more flattering form. Calling the conventionally beautiful characters ugly inside may puncture their vanity. It does not necessarily retire the habit of sorting people into attractive and repellent categories. The ranking survives; the names change places.

Nor should kindness become the surcharge for having the wrong face. If the outsider must be unusually warm, gifted and forgiving before the audience grants her ordinary dignity, the beauty standard has acquired a compensation scheme rather than disappeared.

This is a risk in how we receive the story, not a verdict on what the series will become. A premiere can establish a possibility. It cannot demonstrate that viewers have changed their habits, much less that workplaces have changed theirs.

Let her be more than the lesson

The coherenceist invitation is to widen the circle without making the new arrival perform gratitude for admission. A shared story can help by giving someone dismissed at first glance more time, more context and more than one relationship in which to exist.

The test is not whether Betty can make us love her. Ferrera's charm, in Bianco's account, already does that work. It is whether our regard can survive a moment when she is not charming: when she is ordinary, mistaken or simply tired of being a lesson for better-dressed people.

Enjoy the heroine. Then notice whether you have asked her to earn something the people laughing at her received for free.