(Bloomberg) — Summer reruns are usually a good excuse to mow the lawn, yet a few shows are worth a second glance. One is “Ugly Betty,” a weekly jab at the fashion industry that reminds us that looks aren’t everything.The one-hour show, which airs Thursday nights on ABC, stars America Ferrera as Betty Suarez, a plain-looking gofer at a New York fashion magazine called Mode. (She’s from working-class Queens, which to many of her coworkers might as well be Alabama or Albania.) Eric Mabius plays her boss, Daniel Meade, while Vanessa Williams is Wilhelmina Slater, the slithering, scheming creative director.

Publisher Bradford Meade turned the magazine over to his womanizing son Daniel, then hired Betty to get the young man to concentrate more on his work. Daniel and Betty make a good team, with her brains and integrity bringing out the limited best in her boss. Meanwhile, Wilhelmina is forever angling to take control of Mode with help from her brown-nosing assistant Marc.

Betty is hardly a hag, though her bushy eyebrows and prominent braces don’t exactly make her runway material. She has what her colleagues would dismiss as inner beauty — honesty, loyalty, kindness and a keen awareness that she’s working in a profoundly superficial world.

The program is part soap opera and part farce; story lines include murder and a secret sex-change surgery. It’s also brimming with pleasing pokes at the fashion vipers, whose favourite network (the fictional Fashion TV) carries the snarky motto, “We only make others feel bad to make you feel good.”

In a recent show, a mock-up of the coming edition of Mode is stolen from Betty’s home. A search-and-rescue mission is launched, though one staffer is horrified by the prospect of setting foot in Betty’s borough: “Queens — Eeeew!”

As it happens, things are hopping in Queens, where Betty’s shapely sister and the similarly apportioned book thief are mixing it up in a hair-ripping catfight.

“I’m gonna show that skank a whole new use for her curling iron,” the sister yells. Meanwhile, the thief wonders why New Yorkers are treating the purloined book like the “freaking Dead Sea scrolls”.

The answer: the mock-up includes “unretouched” photos of a famous model who has chunked up a bit, the publication of which will seemingly cause the universe to collapse. From Betty’s perspective, of course, the photos “are what she actually looks like” <\m> a heretical viewpoint in the fashion world.

The episode has a happy ending, though a final teaser suggests dark secrets about Bradford Meade will be forthcoming. Not exactly a show to sharpen the mind, but to paraphrase Fashion TV, making these fashion folks look bad makes some of us feel good.Dave Shiflett is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.