Insatiable, the controversial new show from Netflix that debuts on Friday, is simultaneously one of the cruelest and most poorly crafted shows I have ever seen. It spends all of its time striving desperately to reach the status of third-tier Ryan Murphy and falling flat. It has Murphy’s gleeful sadism in spades, but none of his manic camp energy; it has his treacly didacticism, but none of his genuine emotion. When Insatiable’s trailer premiered in July to instant, furious backlash, a widespread response was that it was wrong to judge a show by its trailer. Watch it before you pass judgment, people advised. I have now watched every episode of Insatiable, and I can tell you whatever you might be imagining from the trailer is nothing. The reality is much, much worse. Insatiable tells the story of 17-year-old Patty (Debby Ryan, wearing a very fake-looking fat suit for the first few minutes of the pilot), whose classmates have inflicted upon her the nickname Fatty Patty. Patty spends all of her time binge-eating to compensate for her loneliness — because Insatiable is smugly sure that fat people are losers — until a homeless guy punches her in the face. The series presents this encounter as the miracle that Patty needs. Her jaw is wired shut. She is on a liquid diet for three months. Once the wires are removed, Ryan emerges from her fat suit to reveal Patty’s magical new skinny body, and Patty begins to seek her revenge. Teaming up with disgraced pageant coach Bob (Dallas Roberts), she sets off on a quest to win a beauty pageant and prove to all of her classmates that while she might have once been a loser, she is now the winner of all winners. Just to be clear: What it takes to change Patty’s life is violence. She trades getting punched in the face for the chance to have the body of a teenage starlet. It’s a fantasy that is familiar to many women — if only someone would hurt me so that I couldn’t eat, or if only I got some kind of horrible wasting disease or a tapeworm, I could fix my body and then my real life would start — and one that Insatiable embraces wholeheartedly. Rating: 1 out of 5 vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark This fantasy is gross. It is born out of violent self-loathing, out of the desire to hurt and maim and punish a body that our culture has decided is unacceptable. Ostensibly, Insatiable knows how gross of an idea this is. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, showrunner Lauren Gussis described the show as a subversion of the “crazy fever-dream revenge fantasy” she nursed as an overweight teenager. “I got to see how it turned out. ... It didn’t turn out great,” Gussis said. “That’s what was healing. That’s the thing that released me.” And certainly, it’s possible to make a decent TV show that explores this fantasy: AMC’s Dietland, for instance, allows its fat protagonist to wallow in the idea of hurting her body to “fix” it. But Dietland is clear about how toxic the fantasy is, and explores its protagonist’s hatred of her body without reflecting that hatred back at the audience. Insatiable is not able to pull off the same trick. When it delves into Patty’s self-loathing, it can’t avoid suggesting that she was right to hate herself, that fat people should hate themselves, and that they should hurt their bodies until they get better — which is to say skinny. The newly thin Patty might not be perfect, but the show never drops the subtext that hey, at least she’s not fat anymore, and that’s what really matters. And it doesn’t even manage to craft its message well. Throughout its 12-episode run, Insatiable crawls its way through a series of tired, stale gags, punching ever further downward, to finish with the most subdued of whimpers in its finale. Insatiable is not only cruel and fatphobic; it’s boring, too. Here are nine things you should know about Insatiable’s first (and hopefully only) season. Spoilers follow. 1) The show’s catchphrase is “skinny is magic.” “Trust me, skinny is magic,” pageant coach Bob tells an insecure Patty early in the season. Bob himself, he confides, used to be fat, and now that he’s gotten skinny, his life is much better. Patty briefly doubts Bob’s sage words. “Skinny isn’t magic!” she cries when she fears that she has wished a man to death out of sheer rage, thus demonstrating that she is still the same seething ball of fury when she is skinny as she was when she was fat. But by the next episode, she’s back on the bandwagon. “I knew skinny was magic,” she muses as she shops for bras. But, she allows, there’s a single downside to skinny: “The new Patty was more powerful, but with much smaller boobs.” 2) In the first six minutes of the show, there’s a false accusation of pedophilia and sexual assault When Bob takes Patty under his wing, he is a ruined man. The angry mother of one of his clients has falsely accused him of pedophilia. “HE TOUCHED HER HOO-HOO!” the mother shrieks, rushing the pageant stage. Bob denies everything, but to no avail. “I was an accused molester saying the victim made it up,” he tells us in voiceover. “Which was almost as bad as if I’d actually done it.” As he speaks, the camera lingers over the angry mother miming various … molesty acts, I guess? … over her pelvis. There’s a long, long pause while Insatiable waits for you to laugh. 3) Insatiable is pretty sure there’s nothing as funny as a closeted gay person with a crush … A recurring gag in the first half of the season is that Patty’s best friend is totally gay for her but in denial about it, and this is supposed to be hilarious, because gay people are as pathetic and worthy of mocking as fat people. 4) … unless it’s a closeted gay person who straight people are crushing on Another recurring gag revolves around the fact that pageant-loving and fashion-conscious Bob presents as a stereotype of a gay man, but women fall at his feet. For much of the first half of the season, Patty is crushing madly on him (the plotline disappears without a trace of explanation several episodes in, which is maybe for the best), and Insatiable seems to think it’s mining an incredible amount of humor Patty swooning while a pastel-clad Bob does pelvic crunches. 5) There’s a weird extended gag in which a tiny Asian girl is rapping along to the radio, but she just raps the phrase “my n-word” whenever the n-word comes up, and it seems like the show thinks that’s really funny I don’t even know. 6) Said Asian girl also has her front teeth filed into shark fangs under her veneers You know, the way Asian people do, according to Insatiable. 7) A trans character is used as a prop to illuminate Patty’s self-loathing When circumstances conspire such that Patty must be seen in public in a bikini, she finds herself commiserating with a trans woman. See, the trans woman feels that her body will never be feminine enough, and the newly thin Patty feels that her body will never be skinny enough, and obviously — Insatiable suggests — Patty’s insecurity is the deeper and more meaningful of the two here. 8) The last few episodes are better than the first few In its back half, Insatiable makes a stab at sincerity rather than snark, and while it’s not entirely successful, there are a few half-decent plotlines. Bob begins to explore his sexuality in an arc that is, you know, not as insulting as you might have expected after watching the first half of the season, and Patty makes a weak gesture toward learning that even when she was fat, she was not a loser. It’s all way too little, too late, but it’s there.<doc-sep>Entertainment 'Insatiable' Is Netflix's Worst TV Show Yet -- By Far Netflix Before it even had a chance, people were flaming the new Netflix series Insatiable. The pre-release chatter surrounding the show before it dropped on the streaming platform wasn't just skeptical, but downright fiery. Over 100,000 people signed a petition calling for the show’s cancellation in response to the trailer, which outlined its basic premise: A high school girl gets bullied for being overweight, loses a bunch of weight as a result of having her jaw wired shut all summer after being punched in the face, and then decides to get revenge on her schoolmates by competing in beauty pageants. Indeed, that plot summary shoots off a bunch of red flags. While the strong negative reaction might have been premature for a show that hadn’t even come out yet, Insatiable does little to prove its haters wrong during the course of its first season. In fact, the show’s problems go far beyond its initial flaws. Creator Lauren Gussis has stood by the assertion that the show is intended to be satire, but satire has to, y'know, say something about the things it's satirizing, and Insatiable spends 12 overlong episodes completely unsure of its message. It just doesn’t have many discerning opinions about body image, confidence, and overcoming bullying. It tries so hard to push the envelope that it doesn’t really push anything at all, falling flat as a satire and as an intentionally over-the-top comedy. It feels more like several shows cobbled together into a disjointed, unsettling monster. As the protagonist Patty, Debby Ryan makes the most of what she’s given. In fact, one of the most consistent things about Insatiable are its performances. Dallas Roberts brings some genuinely funny physical comedy to the role of Bob Armstrong, the lawyer and beauty pageant coach who takes Patty under his wing. As Bob’s wife Coralee, Alyssa Milano elevates some of her character’s jokes with her wry delivery, and Kimmy Shields gives one of the more layered and nuanced performances of the series in her portrayal of Nonnie, Patty’s best friend who’s secretly in love with her. But overall, Insatiable is rife with inconsistencies, unevenly employing a clunky voiceover narration from Patty that attempts to channel (and supposedly satirize) a coming-of-age, confessional high school series. Character motivations change haphazardly and at a dizzying rate. Patty’s relationship with food, her anger issues, and her insecurities are all inconsistent, too, subjected to the whims of the plot, which suffers from trying to do too much at once with too many characters fighting for the spotlight. The show has a bafflingly cavalier attitude toward molestation, statutory rape, and boundaries between teens and adults. A storyline about Patty wanting to seduce Bob gets dragged out for way too long and then practically gets retconned as a story about Patty needing Bob as a father figure. Netflix Insatiable feels like one long identity crisis. Even the fact that its episodes are an hour instead of a half-hour doesn’t feel right, and the whiplash of the tonal shifts makes its too-long episodes feel disorienting and interminable. There’s technically some compelling stuff buried underneath all the lazy jokes and rollercoaster writing. The scene where Nonnie finally tells Patty she loves her is gorgeously shot and written -- some of the best writing across the whole series, in fact. But it’s too little too late. The first few episodes merely make a joke out of Nonnie’s crush and even almost cross a line into making her seem predatory. Nonnie and Patty’s best friendship is often unconvincing, especially because of how selfish Patty is within their relationship. The best detail about their relationship is their obsession with Drew Barrymore, but that’s the kind of specificity that many of the interpersonal dynamics lack (Nonnie’s incredulity that Patty watched Firestarter without her is among the very few legitimately funny lines in the first couple episodes). The back half of the season really does feel like a different show entirely -- not a better one, necessarily, but something darker that dials up the drama in confusing places. There’s a sudden twist when it comes to Bob, his wife, and his rival Bob Barnard, played by Christopher Gorham. The Bobs and Coralee end up having to work through some very serious and grounded relationship stuff that’s, again, technically well-written and receives total commitment from all three actors, but it’s entirely out of place. It ends, unsurprisingly, on a cliffhanger that’s completely out of left field and another wild shift in tone and story. But it’s not the kind of cliffhanger that leaves one yearning for more. Insatiable Season 1 is already more than enough. Sign up here for our daily Thrillist email and subscribe here for our YouTube channel to get your fix of the best in food/drink/fun. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a writer and critic living in Brooklyn with her cat named after Sarah Paulson. Her work can also be found on Autostraddle, The A.V. Club, Vulture, and more.<doc-sep>Warning: contains spoilers The most shocking thing about Netflix’s controversial new “dark comedy” Insatiable isn’t the fat girl gets revenge body plotline or the onslaught of un-PC “jokes”. It’s that audiences seem to… like it? Critics hate it for being offensive or homophobic or relying on stale gags. But the show, which has only been out on Netflix for a week, has an 83% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes based on over 1,000 ratings. Google reckons 87% of users like the show and it has a very decent score of 6.9/10 on IMDb from over 5,000 ratings. Compare that to headlines about it being a “train wreck” and “the worst show Netflix has ever made” and a brutal 11% Rotten Tomatoes score and we’re left with a Batman v Superman sized chasm between critics and real people with Netflix subscriptions. When it comes to Insatiable, there’s a Batman v Superman sized chasm between the opinions critics and real people with Netflix subscriptions Advertisement I’m just going to come out and say it. I watched all 12 episodes of Insatiable. I wanted to give it a fair shake and see if it could redeem itself after getting so much backlash over the trailer. All this really gave me, though, is the confidence to tell you that you’ll know from the pilot which side you’re on. And boy, is there a lot going on here. (WARNING: I’m going to get into serious spoiler territory for the whole season now). The story follows 17-year-old Patty Bladell (Debby Ryan), a teen growing up in Georgia and getting bullied about her weight at school. Then Patty gets into a punching match with a homeless man, has her jaw wired shut and is on a liquid diet for three months and – DAH-DAH – she loses shit tons of weight, making her look like a movie star. Her best and only friend is Nonnie (Kimmy Shields) who slowly realises that she’s in love with Patty. And her newfound lawyer/beauty pageant coach is Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts), who slowly realises that he’s in love with his mate Bob Barnard (that guy from Ugly Betty) but maybe also his wife (Alyssa Milano, why? ). Now she’s slim, Patty wants to win beauty pageants and date hot guys to prove she’s a winner not a loser like before – a genuine train of thought had by many a teenage girl – but though she has a few self-aware blips, she’s still signing up for yet another pageant in episode 12. It just gets so boring. And I don’t think this is actually a fat-shaming TV show but I also can’t see that it has much to say on the matter. Post-fatsuit-Patty miraculously doesn’t struggle with hunger or eating habits anymore, aside from one low point with a sheet cake; she doesn’t have stretch marks, she is shown jogging once. And this isn’t even the biggest problem with the show. At one point Bob Armstrong, in one of the show’s insufferable voice-overs, says “I was always taught you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too.” Bob really should have voiced this over to show creator Lauren Gussis and her team of writers. Because Insatiable is too busy jumping through the loopholes of wokeness to actually be a dark teen comedy that knows what it’s doing. It wants all the brownie points without following through. Wanna make a show about society’s treatment of fat people? Loophole! We’ll give the ex-Disney star a fatsuit for the first 20 minutes of the pilot then peter out the flashbacks over the next two episodes. Want a show with a diverse cast? Loophole! Make all the leads white but then introduce characters like Dee, the plus size, black lesbian who morphs into the Angry Black Woman trope after about two scenes. I could go on. All the fat suits and drag queen cameos and sexual awakenings we see are half-baked appetisers and clumsily served sides to the bland, familiar main meal: a skinny, white girl competing in beauty pageants and choosing between blonde Justin Bieber boy and dark ‘n’ sexy Teen Wolf boy Let’s face it, all the fat suits and drag queen cameos and sexual awakenings we see are half-baked appetisers and clumsily served sides to the bland, familiar main meal: a skinny, white girl competing in beauty pageants and choosing between blonde Justin Bieber boy and dark ‘n’ sexy Teen Wolf boy. For all the other hijinks – murders and hobos and demons – many, many minutes of this show are in fact dedicated to these two plotlines. Advertisement It also doesn’t fly to expect us to sympathise with Patty’s body dysmorphia in a bikini shopping scene when half the episodes include cheap jokes with mental health punchlines: “That’s my daughter, she’s mentally ill” and “The demon would explain my behaviour”/”So would borderline personality disorder” and “Look at her, Choi told me she has all sorts of mental disorders” etc etc. Pick a lane, guys, I know you want sooooo hard to be edgy but this isn’t it. I don’t have a problem with watching terrible people interact onscreen. I’m all for unlikeable characters in ensemble shows like Search Party and Arrested Development but maybe the writing just isn’t nearly smart or funny enough here. The puns ‘disastrophe’ (disaster + catastrophe) and ‘tritch’ (troll + bitch) don’t make me cackle, they make me sigh and look around the room. Our anti-heroes Patty and Bob aren’t charming or entertaining enough to make us love to hate them and the supposed satire has nothing to say. OK, OK, there is some nice slapstick and comic timing from Dallas Roberts as Bob; Arden Myrin as cartoon villainess Regina Sinclair and Michael Ian Black as Pastor Mike. I also cracked up hard at Debby Ryan’s deadpan delivery of the line “Where did you learn to play the harmonica?” in the finale. But by then it was much, much too late and I was probably just hysterical that the end of this self imposed ordeal was in sight. I do have what I think is a fairly strong theory that Insatiable is expertly crafted to be watched while you’re half doing something else like reading a book or cleaning the fridge. You get a flavour of the whiney angst and the love triangles and also the big, neon signs that this is a show that includes fat people and gay people and East Asian people without ever pinning down the show’s comedic tone or plot logic or character motivations. I must say, it’s a lot more palatable this way than giving it your absolute full attention because honestly that’s how you end up getting all angry like the angry critics. I have no problem with switch your brain off TV. I just don’t think Insatiable qualifies. The mix of dull, 90210-style plots, meaningless insults and token allusions to LGBTQ centres and marine daughters in Iraq made my head spin. It’s a mess. It’s a mess and with those audience scores, all this free publicity from super snarky reviews and a cliffhanger ending, there’s no way we’re not getting a season 2. Would it help if we said we’re full?<doc-sep>
Good intentions won’t crown a beauty queen, and they don't come close to making up for a slew of narrative, technical, and performative mistakes. [Editor’s Note: The following review contains spoilers for “Insatiable” Season 1 on Netflix.] “Insatiable” is about a 17-year-old girl who loses a lot of weight, immediately transforms into a bombshell, and gets recruited to become a beauty pageant queen. Yet no matter what assumptions you think you can make about the 12-episode narrative based on this seemingly straightforward plot summary, think again. Heroes are villains, villains are heroes, statutory rape is a joke, and people — people! — are murdered, all in a high school “comedy” primarily obsessed with winning a fancy tiara. Lauren Gussis’ disastrous hodgepodge of mistakes is an absolute mess, and it marks the worst Netflix original series yet to be released. In summation, there’s not one thing that needs to be said about any of its lamentable traits — there are dozens. So below, IndieWire has tried to sort through the jumble of unintentional red herrings and unfortunate double entendres to identify one reason per episode you, dear reader, should stop watching. Maybe you won’t, based on this intro or other negative reviews you’ve checked out. (There are many.) But in case any of those delicious takedowns piqued your interest in seeing a train wreck, or you simply have no self-control when it comes to bingeing new Netflix entries, let these spoiler-filled examples dissuade any interest from watching. Of note: Such thorough evaluation isn’t meant to pile on, nor is it some sort of twisted revenge — “Since I had to watch it, you’re going to read about it!” It’s because recognizing flaws can lead to less of them in the future, or, if you’d rather, it’s because if enough people do watch “Insatiable,” Netflix might pick it up for another season. And that’s no good for anyone. Tina Rowden/Netflix Episode 1 – “Pilot” Problem: Sexual harassment is a joke. Before “Insatiable” even catches viewers up to present day, it makes a very poorly timed joke equating being accused of sexual harassment with being a victim of sexual harassment. While introducing Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts) as a defense attorney by day, pageant coach by night, the pilot uses flashback to show how he went from one of the most sought after instructors in the biz to a man no one will touch with a 10-foot poll. Such isolation wasn’t really necessary to get him to coach Patty Bladell (Debby Ryan) — after all, the two leads meet when she hires him to be her lawyer — so the reason for Bob’s ouster isn’t even necessary. After his contestant loses a pageant, her mother blames Bob, rushes the stage, and accuses him of “disturbing” her daughter. “He touched her hoo-hoo!” Regina screams to the crowd. “That was it,” Bob says in narration. “I was an accused molester saying the victim had made it up — which was almost as bad as if I’d actually done it.” Hoo boy. Where to begin? Perhaps it’s most important to remind men that being accused of something is never as bad as doing it. Also, such a joke negates the feelings of actual victims, since that’s what so many defenders of the accused argue — that the accusation is as bad as the act. And finally, that the accusation is done thoughtlessly depicts other accusers as irrational, vengeful idiots who make up claims to get their way. In reality, it’s very hard for anyone to come forward with such information. Maybe this last point is coming from an overly sensitive place, but we’re living in a sensitive time. “Insatiable” taking sexual harassment lightly in 2018 only makes the joke feel so much grosser. Episode 2 – “Skinny Is Magic” Problem: One of the protagonists acts like a pedophile. By the second episode, Bob is leaning toward “total creeper” classification, and that’s not the intention. Sure, he’s kind of contradicted himself with the whole “I don’t believe in destiny, but I do believe in fate” stuff (which pops up to contradict itself in the finale, as well), and it was already a little creepy the way he secretly propositioned Patty to become his beauty pageant protege. But then he follows a drunk, underage girl — Magnolia, played by Erinn Westbrook — up to her room with no one else in the house and watches her undress.