We have come to a time when starring in a reality show no longer means you have exhausted all other options. The star might represent a reasonably well-functioning, otherwise successful human being, rather than the sort of train wreck that the form initially seemed to favor and from whose cluelessness viewers drew dark enjoyment.

In other words, you no longer have to be Anna Nicole Smith, or Whitney and Bobby, to want to get into this game.

Korean-American comedian Margaret Cho, whose good-natured reality entourage sitcom "The Cho Show" debuted Thursday night on VH1, is by any visible standards doing quite well. (The first episode repeats tonight at 4 and 11 p.m.)

She has a big house in the hills, parents who love her even if they don't necessarily understand her, fans who adore her near to the point of speechlessness, colleagues who owe their careers to her example, and a career of her own that can keep her as busy as she wants.

She's been given awards by the National Organization for Women, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. And her helpers — "assistant" Selene Luna, makeup guy John Stapleton, hair guy John Blaine and wardrobe guy Charlie Altuna — are also her friends, and they seem to be there happily, because they love her, and not fearfully, because they need her.

Although Cho's career and personal life took a downturn in the mid-1990s — a dispiriting foray into network sitcoms left her with kidney failure (she starved herself to get thin for the pilot) and an identity crisis (was she too Asian, or not Asian enough?) — she bounced back at decade's end with the one-woman show "I'm the One That I Want." It's been tours, concert films and kudos ever since.

She further remade herself in the Hollywood underground, where performance art, comedy, bodyworks and the new burlesque all bump up against one another — the witty Luna, a 3-foot, 10-inch Tijuana-born burlesque dancer and comedian, comes from that scene — and if the not-thin, extravagantly tattooed Cho has body issues now, she faces them head on. We see her Thursday night half-naked, clad mainly in body paint and rhinestones. (The show is rated TV-14.)

Still, comedy subsists on pain, and the show, whose tenor is largely happy and light, goes to still-painful memories of darker times for fuel.

"I totally forget," she says, tearing up. "Like, I'm so, like, fabulous now, I'm so glamorous now. But I really didn't feel like that when I was a kid at all — it was really hard."

In this week's episode, she and Luna, deploring mainstream notions of attractiveness, stage a beauty pageant of their own. They get spray-on tans and instruction in ventriloquism for the talent competition, which leads to a Shari Lewis parody with Luna as Lamb Chop.

"The Cho Show" also benefits no end from the presence of Cho's parents, who are billed as Mr. Cho and Mrs. Cho and seem incapable of artifice. (She keeps them near, she says, because "old people are a really good source of prescription medicine.")

To be sure, this is the sort of engineered reality in which things mostly happen because someone is there to film them, and not the other way around. But that it is only a partial, edited view of its star — she has, for one thing, a husband, artist-provocateur Al Ridenour, who is neither seen nor heard — doesn't mean real thoughts and feelings don't come through. It's best when they do.