It felt like the world exploded with rage when the trailer for the latest Netflix original series “Insatiable” dropped July 19.
Critics and audiences lambasted the trailer. Claims the show is fatphobic quickly surfaced. According to reviews, the show put forth the idea that when someone is fat they are intensely bullied and miserable, but as soon as they are skinny all their problems are resolved. This is not the case with this show.
The controversy grew to include a petition on change.org calling for the show’s cancellation. As of publication, it has more than 235,000 signatures.
In response, the show’s creator and head writer Lauren Gussis defended herself in a Vanity Fair article Insatiable Creator Lauren Gussis Wants You to Give Her Controversial Show a Chance, “The story is not ‘somebody gets thin, becomes happy, and gets everything she wants.’ It’s actually quite the opposite, but the story has to start somewhere.”
The show itself was released Aug. 10 and Gussis was right in that it was not about what people thought it would be about. What “Insatiable” ended up being was an unwatchable mess that is considerably worse than anything that could’ve been predicted from watching a trailer.
The trailer and Gussis indicates that the show will be about Patty Bladell, played by Debbie Ryan, an overweight high school girl who becomes skinny after an altercation leaves her with a broken jaw and her resulting misadventures.
While she is a primary character, the real star and one that ignites the plot and drives it forward is lawyer and aspiring pageant coach Bob Armstrong, played by Dallas Roberts.
I’m not sure if it is a marketing strategy or if Gussis just doesn’t understand what makes someone a focal point of the show, but whatever it may be the show is not structurally about Patty Bladell.
There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, what is wrong is how intensely unfunny the show is.
Insatiable is marketed as a “dark comedy.” The show is chock full of debauchery, murder, and a major part of the series involves Armstrong being falsely accused of child molestation by one of the antagonists that, ironically, is a statutory rapist.
There is a place for offensive humor, take hit FOX series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” a show that gained popularity on being offensive. However, the show is framed in such a way that ensures that the main characters are horrible people that aren’t normal in the world.
The camera work, the consistent writing, the exaggerated acting of the main cast, the way secondary characters react to them – “Philadelphia” does a lot to frame the antics of the main cast as different than the norm and comical.
“Insatiable” does nothing of the sort. There is no world building to speak of and there is barely any characterization. Each character is a one-note joke that spends a majority of the time spitting out one-liners and offensive jokes rather than building any personalities to justify them.
Without the characters having strong personalities outside of cliché tropes, the humor consistently falls flat and rarely goes beyond a chuckle. Oftentimes the humor is offensive for the sake of being offensive that will at best have you rolling your eyes.
The drama is even worse. The pacing is horrible and that’s a result of the poor writing and choppy editing. The shows idea of plot is establishing a plot point, ignoring it for multiple episodes, and then resolving it out of nowhere while continuing to introduce new plot points.
It makes the show appear sloppy and confusing, you’re never clear on what’s going on or ever really sure that you’re properly following because at any given moment a new plot can get introduced or dropped out of nowhere with no build up whatsoever.
It’s hard to get invested in the story when the show doesn’t really build or allude to any of its major twists. The show feels like it’s throwing stuff at the wall rather than telling a planned story.
Most inept of all is the set design, which is at best boring and at worst nonsensically cheap and incompetent. One could argue that it was intentional for the sake of poking fun at beauty pageants, but the show doesn’t dedicate to it enough for it to be an excuse.
Maybe if scenes had cardboard cutouts for backgrounds, if the acting was hokier, or even if the show’s tone was sillier, I would believe that but oftentimes shots will take place in regular convenience stores or backstage in a building. The halfway decent sets that do exist betray the existence of the awful ones.
The show’s disturbing lack of establishing shots means that you’re never sure where anyone is in the space. Oftentimes, characters are sitting in rooms or areas where there has been no given context about where they are except for maybe one character ham-fistedly mentioning it, the worst example being a lazily inserted cheap looking sign that claims that a house was in a general direction to the left.
Towards the end, a few plot points shape and one character in particular, the best friend Nonnie, gets some tender moments that are genuinely emotional.
However, it’s not enough to save a mess of a show that refuses to establish a tone or any sort of basic idea.
The show takes itself way too seriously at times for it to be just campy fun. The sheer heavy handedness of some scenes prevent me from believing that the intention wasn’t drama. Not to mention the creator’s insistence that this is supposed to be a reflection of what she has gone through.
The inverse is also true that the show will often undermine its more dramatic themes with silly, immature jokes. It’s hard to take a scene about regret for one’s past when it takes place in a restaurant called “Weiner Taco”
Gussis told The Chicago Tribune via phone interview, “From the beginning I had always said that if I touched one person, like if I made one person feel less alone, I had done my job, and it’s been like dozens and dozens of people have reached out to me saying that I did that.”
And while I cannot speak for anyone that was emotionally touched by the show and how one personally feels, I can safely say that “Insatiable” has genuinely nothing to offer. It’s too serious to be campy, too poorly made to be appreciated as a craft, too inept to be boundary pushing, and too offensive to just be fodder. Avoid at all cost.