Michelle Buteau is Netflix’s new comedy series prom queen of enlightened cutie-pies. Does the world need another “You go, girl!” testimonial, a plucky femme who’s not going to let the world burst her self-affirmation bubble?

Normally, I would say no. But Michelle Buteau may be too irresistible in her rom-com debut, “Survival of the Thickest.”

Writer and star Buteau outshines the rest of her cast, gets all the best lines and has an after-school-special therapy moment for every day of her life. It may sound obnoxious on paper, but onscreen, Buteau’s presence is easy to drink in. She is charismatic, tender, and she sports the cutest little freckle face since Meghan Markle. When she’s lit, you can’t turn away.

Showbiz veteran Buteau is on a streak. She’s the co-star you can’t forget in “Always Be My Maybe” and BET’s “First Wives Club.” In 2020, she landed a gig hosting Netflix’s reality show “The Circle,” but the knockout punch came later that year with her comedy special, “Welcome to the Buteaupia,” which became a hit on the streaming service. The same year, she wrote a memoir called “Survival of the Thickest,” which inspired this series.

Buteau’s family background is cosmopolitan, which she enjoys to great comic effect and biracial empathy. Her parents are Haitian, Jamaican, Lebanese and French. (Fun fact: Her uncle is the Catholic archbishop of Jamaica. I’d love to know what he thinks of her work, as Buteau does not shy away from the pleasures and pitfalls of premarital sex.)

In the series, Buteau plays Mavis Beaumont, a striving plus-size fashion stylist and romantic who wants to make women left out of the rail-thin, ivory marble-skinned elite look great. Yes, you’ve heard that dream before. But Buteau is so stinkin’ cute you keep watching it.

Mavis has a rich girl BFF (Tasha Smith, “Empire”), an artsy boy BFF (Tone Bell, “The Flash”) and an eccentric white roommate (Liza Treyger, “Horace and Pete”) who uses a little too much olive oil on everything. Each bestie is determined to “follow their passion” and no one seems to have a problem paying the rent or finding a therapist.

Indeed, this is escapist television. It puzzles me why “Thickest” didn’t go for the full flavor of something like ABC’s award-winning “Abbott Elementary.” “Abbott” is a sitcom with a smarty-pants female lead, where each co-star is comedy gold — and there’s playful suspense with each episode. In “Thickest,” the creators had Buteau’s memoir and personality to draw on, but whenever it strays from that, it’s threadbare.

Yes, the eye candy is great — there are chocolate pop tarts at the bodega and artist lofts with floor-to-ceiling windows that’ll make New Yorkers homesick — and the cast has costume changes every few minutes as if it were a hip Black Brooklyn “Sex in the City.” Their nightlife is just as fabulous, too; one of their chief hangouts is a drag queen venue with the one co-star who makes a lasting impression: Peppermint.

The real-life Peppermint, who competed in season nine in “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” became the first trans woman to create a principal role on Broadway. Here in “Thickest,” she wrote, or at least edited, her own lines, ensuring she is not to be denied a scene-stealing turn.

Mavis’ arc is to search for a good man and kill it on the red carpet. But none of that is the good part of the show. Where the story shines, is the smaller bits, like when the cute friends are confronted by an angry coffee-shop-Karen (“But I voted for Cory Booker!”) or when Mavis finds out that even if she wants to have children, her ovaries have been vetoed by the gynecologist.

Each time the show sticks to Buteau’s own history and insights, we sit up and say, “You know, this ball of fire might be going somewhere!”

Susie Brightis a freelance writer.