Say hello to Betty Suarez, America’s new top non-model. A Latina girl from Queens with ragged eyebrows, metal braces in her mouth, and a fondness for garish ponchos, the heroine of the new ABC series “Ugly Betty,” which makes its premiere Thursday night, is clueless about clothes but passionately interested in things like Darfur and the London art scene. Her burning ambition is to land a job at Meade, a fictional magazine empire you can safely think of as Condé Nast. And land a job she does, but not at the kind of serious, New Yorker-style publication of which she dreamed.

Instead, she is made assistant to the rakish editor in chief of Mode, the Meade fashion bible in whose Manhattan offices, inhumanly stylized to resemble the interior of a pastel-colored spaceship, no creature like Betty has ever been seen.

Movies (“The Devil Wears Prada,” “Marie Antoinette”) and television (“America’s Next Top Model,” “Project Runway”) have become so besotted with fashion that it was inevitable a counter-intuitive gem like “Ugly Betty” would come along. In fact, the series began in 1999 as a Colombian telenovela called “Yo Soy Betty La Fea.” It proved so popular that it was adapted or presented with subtitles as far afield as India, China, Israel, Hungary, Germany, and Russia before landing on the steps of ABC. So for once Americans, Spanish speakers aside (the Colombian version was shown on Telemundo), find themselves at the back of the global television line.

A furrowed brow in a world of frozen foreheads, Betty is played by 22 year-old America Ferrera, and the one false note may be that however plain Betty may appear, Ms. Ferrera herself is quite a looker. She has lovely dark hair, lips that need not be delivered to the bees, and large, emotive brown eyes. Thus the inner beauty that shines forth from this ugly duckling is subtly enhanced by unmistakable signs of outer allure.Yet Ms. Ferrera is such a tremendous performer that she can puncture all that with a single, braces-flashing, cringe-inducing smile.

Ironically, it’s Betty’s very plainness that gets her the job at Mode. Meade’s sinister CEO, Bradford Meade, has just appointed his wastrel son, Daniel, editor of “Mode” in a blatantly nepotistic move. Daniel (Eric Mabius), whose mind is as mussed as his hair, spends all his time chasing gorgeous personal assistants around the office. Ergo Betty: She’s smart, and Daniel’s father, who hires her, knows his son will never, ever, try to take her to bed. With luck, he might even do some work.

Naturally, Daniel is appalled and embarrassed by the mere sight of Betty — how can he be taken seriously with an assistant who looks like that? So he enlists the help of a très snob French photographer to force her to quit via the time-honored corporate strategy known as “continuous ritual humiliation.” In the words of the Frenchman, “You beat her down to a … pulp.” (The expertly deployed accent makes that last word as visceral as a blood-spattered corpse on “CSI.”) How Betty manages to evade total pulpdom is the story of the first episode.

But first she must undergo a truly excruciating scene in which she is forced to dress up like a Ninth Avenue prostitute and take part in a ghoulish photo shoot while anorexic models snigger at her chubby thighs. It’s a fashion-world crucifixion.

The great advantage of caricature is that it allows you to sketch entire characters, scenes, and even neighborhoods with a few nimble strokes. In its cartoonish way,”Ugly Betty” covers a lot of ground. There’s Vanessa Williams as Daniel’s archrival, Wilhemina Slater, so full of Botox she’s barely human, who dresses as if she was on a Fashion Television Channel version of “Star Trek.” Passed over for the job of editor in chief, she summons every remaining nerve ending, along with her simpering assistant (Michael Urie), to bring Daniel down. Gina Gershon also has a delicious cameo as a tempestuous Italian cosmetics tycoon who recently suffered the personal misfortune of having backed her sports car into a crowd of ordinary human beings.

Betty’s home in Queens, which she shares with her father, older sister, and comically fashion-savvy young nephew, gets generous screen time, too. When she’s not spending hours navigating a labyrinthine HMO phone menu in order to get her father’s heart medication, she’s being pursued by a nerdy suitor who soon abandons her for a tryst with the resident neighborhood vamp.

The pain, sliding into panic, that registers in Betty’s eyes as she learns that this vacillating dweeb is not in love with her is part of what makes this show genuinely moving. Though we know the endings will all be happy, mortification, anguish, and humiliation are constants in “Ugly Betty,” and rarely does one witness a televised face that records them as vividly as Ms. Ferrera’s.

“Ugly Betty” is satisfying as well as funny because Daniel is ultimately won over by Betty’s fortitude, not to mention the self-interested realization that she may be the only ally he has amid a staff loyal to Wilhelmina. The scene in which he and Betty finally have it out — with the latter mocking him for complaining of “problems” most people could only dream of, while Daniel gently counters that though his problems may indeed be high-end, they remain problems for him — is intelligently and unsentimentally brought off.

Watching a woman weave beneficient magic over a vacuous but warm-hearted male may be one of the oldest stories in the book, but it’s still working circa 2006. There’s something deeply refreshing about “Ugly Betty,” and the good news is that the second episode fully lives up to the promise of the first. The big question is: Will ABC keep its duckling ugly, or ultimately allow her to win the prince by turning swan?