With her "brace face", granny glasses, '80s hairstyle and dependably cringe-worthy wardrobe choices, Betty Suarez is an unlikely trendsetter.

And yet in the months since her debut last September on American TV, this gawky-looking outsider has become that and much more.

The main character on the Golden Globe-winning Ugly Betty, a one-hour dramedy that premieres on Sunday, March 4, on MediaCorp TV Channel 5, Betty is nothing less than a worldwide phenomenon.

After starting life as the focus of a Colombian soap called Yo Soy Betty, la Fea (I Am Betty, the Ugly), the small screen's leading fashion victim was transplanted to US TV by Mexican actress Salma Hayek and has since appeared in scores of other countries in translated or adapted versions.

Not bad for a nerd from a working-class Latino immigrant family in New York City.

It isn't hard to guess why the trials and tribulations of the decidedly unglam Betty — a fashion magazine assistant played in the US version by 22-year-old America Ferrara — has struck such a chord with viewers that it draws about 14 million viewers per episode in North America alone.

After all, besides a weekly dose of hilarity it also serves up easily relatable stories of workplace intrigue, family crises and conflicts of the romantic, cross-cultural and "slobs vs snobs" variety.

But as much as Betty has become the latest poster girl for women who don't fit the slender and stunning Hollywood ideal, above all it's the show's focus on a little-seen side of American society — the non-Caucasian contingent — that makes it such a groundbreaker.


Black, White And Now Brown

Going by the faces that have traditionally populated US TV shows, it would be tempting to think Americans come in only two shades — black and white — and that even then the ratio is about 100 to 1 in favour of the latter.

In past years, gripes were heard regularly in the US about the "lily-whiteness" of programs such as Friends, Frasier and Seinfeld, for example, and the near absence from network TV of people of Spanish-speaking and Asian origin.

The two groups actually make up about 15 per cent and 5 per cent, respectively, of the US population, with African-Americans accounting for another 15 per cent.

Civil rights advocates have been working for decades to promote more ethnic diversity both behind the scenes and in front of the camera and Ugly Betty's arrival has been welcomed as a step in the right direction.

On one level a serialised version of The Devil Wears Prada — with Meryl Streep's "boss-from-hell" role split between ne'er-do-well publishing scion Daniel Meade (Eric Mabius) and scheming fashionista Wilhelmina Slater (Vanessa Williams) — the show also has elements of a family saga.

"The family life is as important as the work life, and seeing the collision of these two worlds is a cornerstone of this project," Ugly Betty executive producer and writer Silvio Horta told reporters last year on a Television Critics Association press tour.

More than that, Betty's father Ignacio (Tony Plana), older sister Hilda (Ana Ortiz) and closeted, fashion-obsessed nephew Justin (Mark Indelicato) make up the support network she so sorely lacks at work, where attitudes towards her range from grudging acceptance to outright scorn.

Though the Suarez clan seems no more or less dysfunctional than any other — fictional or otherwise — the mere fact of their Spanish-speaking background makes them both an anomaly and a breath of fresh air in the monochrome world of American TV.

African-American families have featured in primetime for decades, in shows ranging from 70s staples Good Times and The Jeffersons to the hugely successful 80s sitcom The Cosby Show to the ongoing Chris Rock-narrated comedy Everybody Hates Chris.

Ugly Betty marks the first time a programme has freed so many Hispanic characters at once from stereotypical roles as gardeners and maids and let them take their rightful place in a vast pantheon of TV families that includes everyone from the Cleavers, Bunkers and Bradys to the Huxtables, Barones and Sopranos.

"People relate not because it's a Hispanic family, it's because it's a family with problems," Williams said during the same press tour. "You relate to the plight of these characters."

Indeed, it's a time-honoured paradox of both TV and real life that the ultimate aim of highlighting shortfalls in ethnic diversity is to create a situation where everyone is represented and the race issue disappears.

In North America, there's a sense that things are moving slowly towards that goal.

Sluggish Progress

Even a few years ago it would have been impossible to believe, but the biggest breakout stars of the latest American TV season are neither white nor black but Hispanic and Asian: Ugly Betty's Ferrara and Heroes' Masi Oka.

Considering both are among only a handful of non-Caucasian and non-African-American actors in Hollywood, few would call this a decisive victory for minorities.

Still, there's no denying that both programmes — Heroes also has a character played by Indian-American actor Sendhi Ramamurthy — are at the leading edge of a trend that has seen more shows experiment with greater ethnic diversity in their casts.

Desperate Housewives boasts TV's best-known Latina in Eva Longoria, while Grey's Anatomy has perhaps its best-known Asian in Korean-Canadian Sideways star Sandra Oh.

My Name is Earl features Puerto Rican-American beauty Nadine Velazquez (albeit as a maid and former pole dancer) while Lost's castaways include African-Americans, Latinos as well as Korean-Americans Yunjin Kim and Daniel Dae-Kim.

Like everything else in Hollywood, money is seen as the key reason for TV's nascent colour-blindness — the plan being to attract more Latino and Asian viewers both inside the US and beyond its borders — but there's also the fact that the US itself is changing.

"If you go to any school now, go to the mall, go to the movies, you look around. This is a multicultural country," Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment, said in a recent interview with entertainment trade journal Variety. "It's certainly reflected in our music and it's only natural that it would be reflected in our broadcast television."

Progress is being made, but lobbying groups like The National Latino Media Council and the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition, which issue annual report cards on the networks' efforts to promote greater diversity, would like to see things move a lot faster.

In the latter group's most recent appraisal, it claimed once again that there are far too many all-white shows and that programmes whose settings suggest they should have Asian-American characters don't.


Asia's Champion

In January, the PBS network in the US took aim at the problem by airing My Life … Disoriented, a half-hour family story that is the first predominantly Asian-American show since comedian Margaret Cho's 1994-95 sitcom All-American Girl.

The programme, which revolves around Chinese-American teenager Kimberlee Fung — who is surrounded by white kids at her California school and has to cope with a multigenerational family at home — stars Maid in Manhattan's Di Quon and also features Japanese-American film veteran Tamlyn Tomita.

The jury is still out on whether My Life … Disoriented has what it takes to give Ugly Betty a run for its money in the ethnic diversity and popularity stakes.

But Quon, for one, is confident. "I don't have any doubt that this show will become a series," she told a California newspaper in December.

It probably wouldn't hurt if her character donned braces, thick glasses and a garish-looking poncho. - TODAY/st