Betty’s in the eye of the beholder

You could choose to focus on the way “Ugly Betty” looks. After all, the title of this new ABC comedy prods you in that direction.

But there’s something more meaningful about this series than the fact that its star, America Ferrera, is hiding her beauty under bushy eyebrows, braces and a mousy wardrobe.

“Ugly Betty,” which premieres Thursday at 8 p.m. on ABC, centers on 22-year-old Betty Suarez, a homely college grad who grew up in the Queens borough of New York.

Betty dreams of landing a plum job in publishing in Manhattan, perhaps at a financial magazine, and she sort of gets what she wants: She’s hired as an assistant to the editor of fashion publication Mode.

It’s a “Devil Wears Prada” sort of setup that will pit her against the pretty people and their superficial world. And it’s the sort of contrast that made “Yo Soy Betty la Fea,” the popular Colombian series on which it’s based.

But none of that gets at what’s truly groundbreaking about “Ugly Betty.” Woven into Ferrera’s role is the story of a first-generation U.S. Latina straddling cultures, a young woman as rooted in her Hispanic upbringing as she is in her American belief that anything can be accomplished with hard work.

At home, Betty helps her widowed immigrant father deal with his frustrating HMO; at work, she saves her boss from losing an important client, even though he has treated her dismissively.

“I feel it’s wonderful that this show is not about her being a Latina, and that’s what makes her different,” says Ferrera, who starred in “Real Woman Have Curves” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.”

“Betty is a minority in every sense of the word: She’s a woman, she’s young, she’s Hispanic, she’s short and not blond and not blue-eyed. Yet she’s got something inside that is very reassuring to watch.”

The youngest of six children who grew up in California with their Honduran mother, Ferrera was proud of her heritage but wanted more than anything to fit in with her peers. Her mother spoke to all the kids (five girls and one boy) in Spanish, and they spoke to her in English because nobody in the neighborhood was speaking Spanish then.

“You’re supposed to find friends, you’re supposed to make a life for yourself,” she says. “It’s that quarrel between how much do I compromise on each side and still understand who I am?”

Ferrera is confident that Americans of all backgrounds will fall in love with Betty, even if some critics have described the show as chauvinistic and the title as mean.

“To me, I would hope that by the middle of the first season we have an audience who isn’t thinking about whether she’s going to undergo a big physical transformation,” she says.

“What I love the most about her is that you’re not waiting for her to become a swan. You get to watch the other people blossom into real human beings because she reminds them what it is to be real.”

The birthday bunch

Actor Michael Douglas is 62. Model Cheryl Tiegs is 59. Actor Mark Hamill is 55. Actress Heather Locklear is 45. Actress Aida Turturro (“The Sopranos”) is 44. Actor Tate Donovan (“The O.C.”) is 43. Actor-singer Will Smith is 38. Actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is 37. Rapper T.I. is 26.