Amanda

Amanda mans the front desk at Mode magazine like she owns it, all glossy hair and gossip-column instincts, more interested in celebrity scandal and her own reflection than actual work. She treats Betty's arrival as an affront to the magazine's aesthetic and makes her opinion of the new assistant loudly, gleefully clear.

Becki Newton plays vapidity as a kind of virtuosic performance art, every eye-roll and gasp calibrated for maximum comic effect, so that Amanda's shallowness becomes genuinely funny rather than just mean. The writing lets her be cruel and ridiculous in the same breath, and Newton finds the rhythm that makes both land.