LOS ANGELES – The pilot episode of “Ugly Betty” won top honors Saturday for comedy television series at the Directors Guild of America Awards.

Director Richard Shepard accepted the award for the TV show, which stars America Ferrera as an awkward, overweight woman working at a fashion magazine. Other TV winners included Rob Marshall for musical variety directing for “Tony Bennett: An American Classic.”

Arunas Matelis won for feature-film documentary for “Before Flying Back to the Earth,” a portrait of children hospitalized with leukemia. The film won over two Academy Award nominees, “Deliver Us From Evil” and “Iraq in Fragments.”

Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” – his return to the vivid, bloody crime genre whose modern conventions he helped pioneer with films such as “Taxi Driver” and “Goodfellas” – was a leading contender for the evening’s top honor for feature-film directing.

The other nominees were Bill Condon for the musical “Dreamgirls,” Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris for the road-trip tale “Little Miss Sunshine,” Stephen Frears for the palace saga “The Queen” and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for the ensemble drama “Babel.”

This was Scorsese’s seventh nomination for the Directors Guild honor, a prize he has never won, though the group did give him a lifetime achievement award in 2003. “The Departed” also marked his sixth nomination for best director at the Academy Awards, an honor that also has eluded him.