This show has the exact same energy as Paramount Heathers and yet it's worse. Insatiable is an interesting show in part because of all the controversy surrounding it. Before it even came out, a petition with over 200,000 signatures was filed demanding that the show be canceled because of concerns over body shaming. Comments left on the petition like "what kind of examples does this set for young women?" And "I don't want young girls to hate myself the way I used to" reveal an intimately emotional reaction that a lot of people initially felt towards the show. This is primarily because of the trailer that was released three weeks ago. In it, it depicts a high school student named Patty shown in a *very* unconvincing fat suit Patty is bullied for her weight and is given the nickname "Fatty Patty" until she's punched in the face and has to have her mouth wired shut losing her 75 pounds. The way the trailer frames the show is that suddenly everything improves for patty She stops being bullied. She feels better about herself, and finally she enters into a revenge plot where she systematically takes down all the people who bullied her. It's understandable that people would be pretty unhappy with the message that premise sends. The idea that in order to stop being bullied and finally be happy with yourself all you have to do is lose weight is not only blatantly incorrect, But it's also pretty harmful to young people struggling with their body image. At the same time in the initial backlash to insatiable was accompanied by a sort of counter backlash. Now that the shows come out the reddit review thread skews mostly positive, the like to dislike ratio on the trailer is roughly 8 to 1, and the outube comment section is full of support both from people who said it was unexpectedly good, and people who were tired of those damn oversensitive Millennials complaining about everything. So what's the truth? Is Insatiable a horrible fat shaming mess? or is it a genuinely good show that just suffered from a misleading trailer? So there's good news and bad news here, the good news is that the show does manage to handle Patty's weight with slightly more nuance than the trailer seems to suggest. A lot of the show is centered around the fact that while she initially thought that getting skinny would fix all of her problems it turns out that it actually doesn't. The bad news is that it is still a very bad show and it's bad for way more reasons than the initial trailers seemed to suggest. So what are these reasons? Well, let's take a look. A lot of trailers nowadays, especially for Netflix original shows for some reason are accompanied by voiceovers where the main character talks to you about their life and what's happening on the show. On top of Insatiable, we see similar voiceovers for shows like To All the Boys I've Loved Before, You, or 13 Reasons Why. Sometimes these voiceovers are only for the trailers and are either non-existent or very limited in the actual show. In 13 Reasons Why there's a diegetic explanation, she's recording tapes to the people in her life. But insatiable instead decides to lean fully into this and so these voiceovers make up a solid third of each episode. The problem is these voiceovers tell us nothing new about the characters that we're not already seeing on screen. We get these long, wordless clips of our two main characters saying things like: "I know I was supposed to hate her, but the truth is I wanted to be just like her," while the other characters act it out. There are a couple problems with these voiceovers. The first is that they're incredibly distracting and immersion breaking. We could be in the middle of a scene where something emotionally impactful is supposed to happen to our characters and suddenly were pulled out of it only to be told what we were already being shown. Let me give you an example; take a look at this clip. "What about my plan to get back at him? I got robbed. My demon was out and she was hungry. Insatiable. I still felt empty like the same pissed-off fat girl, and I would have done anything to make that feeling go away." "And then I saw it. Firestarter." Now take a look at the same clip, but without the voice over. See, not only is everything being told to us in the voiceover still easy to infer without it, but it's also less distracting to watch because we can focus on our main characters in the moment instead of being pulled out of it. Voiceover saying things like: "I finally had Bob alone and now I wasn't sure that I wanted him." are not only annoying, but they're also a little bit insulting. They mostly just relay the inner feelings of the characters, which should be easy to surmise if the actors were, you know, good at acting. The inclusion of these voiceovers almost feels like the showrunners have no faith in either their actors or their audience. Another reason that they're wholly unnecessary is that they're redundant. There's one part in a makeover scene before Patty's trial where Bob explains in a voiceover that he's making her over because being in front of the Judge is like a beauty pageant, Bob, then repeats that exact line in universe to Patty after they win the case. There was no reason for that first voice over to be there if we're still going to get the message the trials are like beauty pageants regardless. My favorite is a scene where Patty screams at a guy in the hospital that she wishes he would drop dead, then he dies, and then she smiles, and *then* about two seconds after we watched this happen, we get a voiceover saying: "I wanted him dead, then he was and I was happy." As if we didn't watch that exact series of events just take place. This isn't just exclusive to voice overs, repeatedly the show employs editing to beat the audience over the head with certain facts that we should all be acutely aware of. For example, Patty's best friend Nonnie is attracted to her. I will talk more about that later. The point here being that we the audience are supposed to know very well that Nonnie is gay and is attracted to Patty. the first few episodes beat you over the head with it, having Nonnie repeatedly suggests to Patty that they should make out or having her constantly check Patty out. When Insatiable later has Nonnie question her sexuality we get no real sense of subtlety from the show. Throughout Nonnie's arc, we have slow shots of her nestling up to Patty or staring wistfully at her as if we couldn't have figured out that she was gay otherwise. It's like the show has the lowest possible expectations for its audience. We don't think you're gonna understand anything we're going for, unless we make it as obvious and straightforward as possible. This makes it pretty annoying to watch and it isn't helped by the fact that every character is a two-dimensional stereotype with no depth or nuance. Maybe if there was any depth or complexity to these characters, the hand-holding on the part of the showrunners would be less obvious and more bearable, but instead feels it like I'm watching an episode of Dora the Explorer and I need to be told who the good guys and who the bad guys are with a big neon sign. Speaking of the characters... There are a few reasons as to why it's genuinely difficult to care about any of Insatiable's characters. The first is that there's a real lack of consistency when it comes to these characters' personality and motivations. This is especially noticeable with our main character Patty, whose personality and desires seem to change on a dime. Mind you not in the way where it's supposed to be a character trait. On the contrary, we're told repeatedly that Patty is incredibly single-minded and intensely devoted to her goals. And yet despite what we're told by Patty and the other characters, there's no real consistency to Patty's character. By the show's sixth episode, Patty has already changed who she's in love with like three times and she repeatedly cycles through various motivations: revenge, romance, friendship, based on whatever the plot wants her to do at that moment. There's no real sense of consistency to her character, which makes it hard to root for her. On top of that, it's hard to feel any real sympathy for Patty when we don't know anything about her. All we really get is that she was fat, now she's not, and she wants revenge. Everything else seems subject to change based on what the plot demands of her. First of all, we only get like two minutes of "Fatty Patty." And most of that is just devoted to cartoonish shots of her being bullied. We don't get any real sense of her interests, her values, or her personality traits. As a result when Patty loses weight, we don't get a sense of any real transformation beyond the physical. One of the factors when the characters are considering whether or not Patty could have killed a homeless guy was how different she was now that she's lost weight. But because we know almost nothing about her, we can't really fully appreciate what that difference means. There's this whole emotional moment in episode six where Nonnie confronts Patty and talks about how even before Patty was thin, she still made everything about her. This is supposed to be this big moment where Patty realizes that she has to change but because we never get any clear sense of what exactly Nonnie is talking about, we can't really feel the emotional weight that they're trying to give this scene. Once again, we're simply told something about our main character rather than shown it and as a result it's not particularly meaningful to us. Patty is an extremely bland character and yet she's just unlikable enough that the audience can't project ourselves onto her à la Twilight. Her entire character for the first six episodes is just committing manslaughter and then repeatedly trying to seduce a married guy who's already been accused of sleeping with a minor. She then ruins his marriage by giving his wife evidence of an affair and, only feels guilty about it after it also hurts her high school crush. The most frustrating part is she never seems to learn from her mistakes. Every single opportunity she's given to do something shitty and selfish, she takes. She cheats on two boyfriends in succession. She cheats at a beauty pageant by stealing the pageant's quiz answers. Her first conversation with Nonnie after the aforementioned argument is her not apologizing, but demanding Nonnie leave a date to help her study. She rips a wheelchair out from underneath someone to prove she's not really paraplegic. We're supposed to feel bad that everyone is mad at her for doing that bt-dubs. She then outs her pageant coach to his entire family and then gets mad at him when he doesn't want to talk to her anymore and starts coaching someone else. She then steals a car and plans to commit kidnapping to sabotage her opponent's pageant performance while simultaneously breaking a promise to her best friend and her boyfriend. The worst part is that it's framed like this big face heel turn where she finally makes this horrible decision to let go of her integrity when she literally never had any integrity in the first place. It turns out that Roxy and her mother were prepared and end up kidnapping her in turn. We're then supposed to feel bad that she's been kidnapped and root for her when she just tried to do the exact same thing. The season finally culminates with her murdering two people and learning nothing in the process. Bob isn't much more likable either. He's duplicitous and annoying repeatedly manipulating his wife and lying to her. Halfway through the season, He ignores Patty during a pageant that could make or break her career, instead choosing to stay on his phone waiting for a DNA test result throughout the entire thing. The only reason he later apologizes for this is because he realizes that Roxy was not his father. Like that's the reason why that was shitty. He gets mad at his wife for cheating on him while they were on a break and then sleeps with his neighbor after he and His wife have already made up. Once again, we're supposed to feel bad for him when his wife cheated on him and then we're also supposed to feel bad for him when he cheated on his wife and she found out and got upset with him. Not to be a robot here, but I'm really having trouble drumming up sympathy for this guy. (Squeaky Voice) "But wait, that's the entire point They're not supposed to be good people." Okay, look. It's okay to have media with characters who aren't good people. Some of the best movies and shows are about characters who we're not really sure if we should be rooting for, like Breaking Bad, The Godfather, or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But there's a key difference between those shows and this one. If you want to be successful at writing likeable characters who are also bad people, they need to have some degree of relatability to them and they need to be entertaining. Or they need to learn and grow throughout the course of the show. Insatiable does not do either of those things. As an example of what to do well, look at Cersei's character in Game of Thrones I would usually put a clip of her here, but I would like to not be demonetized this time. Cersei is in arguably a pretty terrible person but we can still empathize with and connect to her through, say, how she feels about her children. Showing her humanity in depth helps us build empathy for her. Another somewhat different example is The Good Place. Yes, I'm talking about The Good Place again, which will probably eventually send me to The Bad Place. The Good Place starts with a protagonist who's a pretty awful person. She's abrasive, mean, lies to her friends, and doesn't think of anyone but herself. But throughout the course of the show, she gradually becomes a better person and therefore becomes more likeable and understandable in the process. So there are different kinds of characters who aren't good people and there are ways to make them likable whether they become better people or stay bad throughout the rest of the show. The problem with Insatiable is that it doesn't do either of those things. No one on the show ever learns from their mistakes or experiences any real growth. Stuff happens to them, sure, But nothing that happens to them ever leads to any fundamental changes or developments in who they are as people. At the same time, there's nothing really relatable about them either. The show's over-the-top nature means that everything that happens to them is out there and ridiculous like being tasered in a hot dog costume or performing an exorcism last minute. That's fine in and of itself, the show is ostensibly a comedy. But because there's nothing really connecting us to our protagonist It's also hard to find any of it particularly funny. None of it has any real meaning - it's just stuff that happens. Similarly the way that Insatiable attempts to build empathy with our bland, unlikable protagonist is just by having bad stuff happen to them. Patty's been bullied, she has a terrible mom, etcetera. Bob was bullied as a child, He's falsely accused of sexual harassment and he hates his family situation But that alone - just making bad things happen to a character in hopes of building sympathy doesn't in and of itself make something enjoyable to watch. The only main character who really has a personality and gets a lot of depth and development is Nonnie. I'll give the show credit for an OK arc where Nonnie is questioning her sexuality. It's one of the few times that the show gives us a character who they allow to be human long enough for us to actually like her, and it is refreshing in the show's mass of unlikable characters to have a character who's allowed to be taken seriously and related to. But even she's a treasure trove of shitty character tropes, like the lesbian who constantly makes borderline harassing sexual remarks about her straight friend. Fun fact: the predatory lesbian trope has a really nasty history that spreads back decades. It even has its own TV Tropes page! Like with queerbaiting it originated with the Hays Code Disallowing any portrayal of characters that could be viewed as an approval of being gay. This meant that any character who was vaguely gay was also going to have to be a total creep. Sadly, this trope has persisted with shows like Pretty Little Liars and Smallville and its effects extend beyond television. Gay people are frequently viewed as inherent predators leading to things like gay men not being allowed to be Boy Scout troop leaders until 2015 or Girls being super intimate and touchy-feely with each other as long as there's not a lesbian in their presence. Nonnie constantly macking on Patty is nothing new or inventive It's just a regurgitation of a harmful decades-old trope and it's never really deconstructed or viewed critically. I wouldn't normally spend too much time talking about this next point, except for the fact that Insatiable is now being praised by fans for its diversity. So I think it's worth looking into whether this show is actually deserving of that praise and I don't think that it is. The show frequently pays lip service to representation having minority characters in the background, but never fully explored. There's a trans character in like a two-minute scene who never shows up and is never mentioned again. There are brief mentions of social causes like eating disorders, But no real exploration of how those work or what those mean for our characters. The characters who aren't treated as utterly unlikable, or as stereotypes are just utterly bland. There are at least three or four ostensibly important "characters" in the show for whom I could probably not name a single personality trait. Frustratingly, although the show has received a decent amount of praise on social media for being diverse the highly unexplored characters tend to also be the diverse ones. For example, Donald Choi is supposedly a primary character and he's often kind of there, But we never learn a single thing about him. Literally not a word about his values or interests or background. This is similarly true for Nonnie's girlfriend Dee, with whom she ends up in a relationship despite barely knowing her. She stays in a relationship with Nonnie throughout the rest of the season and yet she doesn't have a single personality trait beyond she's plus-sized and does pageants. The only thing less developed on this show than its characters are its plot. Most of what happens on the show does not hold up to even a second of critical thought. Part of the problem is the way it handles its content matter. Insatiable tries repeatedly to handle the issue of bullying people based on their weight. The creators tried to preemptively push hard against the idea that the show is fat shaming by making it obvious that they don't condone the bullying that Patty experienced. The problem is that the issue here isn't treated with any real nuance which makes it hard to derive any real message from it. For example, most of the clips that depict Patty being bullied feel like they're straight out of a cartoon and not from a piece of media that genuinely tries to delve into the psychological effects of that kind of bullying. There's one example where the entire band is literally following Patty down the hallway where someone with a tuba plays a note every time she takes a step. And like yeah funny black comedy, But if you're trying to take a serious look at the psychological effects of a negative body image as the show repeatedly tries to do, it's hard to take the whole thing seriously. What about how what most people take as normal, everyday experiences can be seriously can be seriously dehumanizing? Even mundane life can feel incredibly degrading when there are no clothes your size at the store or you have to ask for a seat belt extender on a plane and you can feel people's judgemental glances, and that can be a lot more destructive to someone's mental health and a lot more real than someone writing "You are fat" in a yearbook or whatever. Conversely most of the show's sillier moments are justified by the idea that it's a black comedy and nothing is off-limits so it's okay if sometimes the serious stuff doesn't entirely work. The problem is the comedy doesn't really work either. The funniest punchline that the show has for the first few episodes is ass cancer and it gets repeated over and over and over again with a host of other unfunny toilet humor Yeah, they literally plagiarized a joke from Cards Against Humanity, made it less funny and then turned that into the foundation of their comedy for an entire season. This bodes well. The other way that this show justifies being not very good is that it references all of the tropes it employs as well as other similar movies, like being self-aware absolves it of all of its writing problems. We get a lot of "This is like in Breakfast Club" where Don't You Forget About Me plays in the background or "This is like in every awesome teen movie ever" or "This would be the part in a teen movie where you get cooler friends" or "This is like Karate Kid." Magnolia and Christian going out to make Patty jealous is even said to be "like one of those stupid movies from the 80s." One of the cafeteria scenes where Patty is invited to sit with the popular kids after not being sure where to sit, is taken almost shot-for-shot from Mean Girls. The problem with this is that it quickly starts to get stale which is when it becomes painfully obvious that the show doesn't have much going for itself on its own. References aren't inherently bad on their own. Sometimes they can deepen our connection to a story by invoking something with which we're already familiar. But they're best in small doses. For example, the film Pitch Perfect leans on The Breakfast Club for its romance subplot, But still stands on its own as a whole. But when your entire show relies on the presence of other shows and movies, it's weakening itself and letting itself become eclipsed by the numerous much better works of media upon which it relies. Similarly, whenever Insatiable employs tired or clichéd tropes, it feels the need to point this out to its audience. For example, when the only two Asian characters on the show one of whom, bt-dubs, is played by a 27 year old with a horribly fake accent end up hooking up, one of them says, "This is so cliché, we're the only two Asians at school!" The idea here is that pointing out the cliche means they're suddenly absolved of any criticisms of lazy writing 'Cause you know they're ~self aware~ But the problem is that this tends to have the opposite effect. This tells us not only that you employ bad writing, but that you employ bad writing, are aware of it and have no intention of stopping. Honestly, I kind of think that's worse. Another problem with the show is a lack of accountability. Insatiable repeatedly uses one-dimensional characters to directly avoid people having to make hard decisions. During episode four, Patty was struggling with whether or not to break up a marriage she was initially planning on breaking up - yeah, these characters are not likable people - because she was starting to bond with his wife. This could be an actual conflict that could tell us a bit more about the characters and let them develop. But by the end of the episode it turns out that the wife was actually a horrible person all along and Patty immediately breaks up the marriage with no internal conflict about it. Suddenly, we get easy answers and guilt-free decisions. Honestly, it feels like a lazy cop-out. Another time this happens is in the show's ninth episode where Patty rips a wheelchair out from underneath Dixie, a Paraplegic girl who she believes to be faking it. It turns out she wasn't faking it and Patty for once has to deal with the consequences of her actions and confront the guilt surrounding what she did. Except in the next episode before she has the chance to fully do that or grow at all, it's revealed that Dixie was in fact lying about being paraplegic and Patty was right all along. She's absolved of any consequences during situations that should allow her to grow and develop as a character. There's no moral dilemma here. There are also several plot elements that are just difficult to believe as they come out of nowhere. Every four episodes or so the show takes a bizarre tonal shift that seems to be coming out of left field. The first four episodes are mainly centered around pageant life and teen drama. About halfway through the season the show takes a weird hard turn into religious territory, and it's suddenly about demons and exorcisms. Finally the season finishes off as a true crime thriller. All of these genres require vastly different tones and the kind of things that would happen in each genre depend very largely on the kind of decisions their characters would make. The kind of character who would agree to get an exorcism in a religious drama isn't necessarily the same kind of character who would attempt to abduct someone in a taco suit in a thriller comedy. The show's "flexible" characterization has been mentioned before as a detriment to us caring about the characters, but it also actively harms the plot by making every twist and turn seem less plausible. For example, we're supposed to feel the weight of the Patty-Christian relationship when he gets her to run away to Hollywood with him in episode seven - 'cause, you know, we're doing that now - but given that literally one episode earlier, He was scheming to help ruin her pageant experience and before that dated her rival to piss her off and before that lied to her about being able to trace a hacker so he could exploit her help, it's just difficult to believe that she would have any real emotional connection with the guy. This is especially true when before that her whole character was about revenge, So we're supposed to believe that she holds grudges and doesn't forgive anyone. The only thing that's consistent here is a lack of consistency and because of that the plot becomes less and less believable. Another interesting thing about the backlash to the backlash if you will, is that a lot of people are pretty permissive about the shows use of slurs and offensive language. Because the show is political satire and is trying to make some kind of commentary on larger society. And sure, satire has used that kind of content as a way to ridicule power for as long as satire has existed. I mean, the classic example is Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles which uses the racism of the film's antagonists to poke fun at Hollywood's trend at the time of romanticizing the Old West and ignoring the fact that it was actually pretty horrible for a lot of people. It's also a comedy, so yeah, you can do both of those things at the same time and do it well, So why does Insatiable fail at this? Well, Insatiable also uses offensive humor to this end, having unlikable characters use homophobic slurs and other various offensive shit. We also get some delightful jokes about prison rape and gay people and sure this humor can be a way to satirize social problems, But in this case these jokes don't really serve any larger purpose at all, nor are they actually funny. It's just saying something offensive and waiting for audience laughter. They think this suffices as commentary and it doesn't. For example, There's this scene where a gay character is seducing another character who is struggling with his sexuality and they both have this sort of back and forth about how bisexuality doesn't exist and it's just "a stop on the train to "Gaysville" which is a delightfully, funny, ridiculous stereotype that many people actually believe. I don't think that the creators genuinely wanted us to agree with the main characters here. But there's also no criticism or satirization of the idea. The show never really does the work to convince us that the statements of these characters aren't true. And sure, a smart audience can usually decide for itself that, like, bi people exist and homophobia is bad. But that doesn't mean that the show itself is saying that and its weak attempts at satire often read less like they're fun of bigotry and more so that they're just showing bigotry to us and expecting us to assume that the creator's intentions were good. This is especially somewhat concerning coming from Netflix, given that Netflix originals in the past have failed to mention bi people by name. For example, Orange Is the New Black using language like "she used to be gay and now she's straight". Given that the show is a satire and it's therefore responding to certain problems in society, it's also somewhat questionable which problems it attempts to respond to. For example, the reason that Bob is disgraced and hated by everyone is because an unhinged woman got up and accused him of molestation out of nowhere and everyone automatically believed her and demonized him. This is certainly a choice. That's not to say that false accusations never happened, certainly they do, but having this be a response to the Me Too movement is very odd. Having a high-powered lawyer's life being entirely ruined because a woman said he molested her is kind of disingenuous when people in similar situations are still doing fine. Aziz Ansari, who most people site is a good "gray area" in these kinds of situations is having his show brought back to Netflix. Catfish's Nev Schulman was accused of sexual misconduct and is still the lead of a highly successful MTV show. John Lasseter, who had similar accusations leveled against him, is likely to return to Pixar soon. The idea that there's this epidemic of moral high-powered people having their lives entirely irreparably, demolished by false accusations is strange and doesn't feel entirely honest. It would be one thing if this were just a plot point in a story, it's just something that happens to a character and it's not an attempt to comment on wider society. But this clearly isn't the case here, this show makes frequent reference to topical political issues often putting in their two cents as aforementioned. Half the time Insatiable isn't sure what it wants to say and the other half what it does have to say is not great. I don't believe that the creators had the intention to discredit the Me Too movement or claim that bisexuality doesn't exist. But they did fail in their attempts to appropriately satirize these ideas. The negative response to Insatiable's trailer may indeed have been preemptive. To be fair, the trailer was somewhat misleading. However, the misleading elements were mainly about the show's themes, choosing to market a soap opera-esque pageant story as a tale of cold, systematic revenge. But what viewers anticipated that the show was going to be poorly made and borderline offensive sadly ended up being right on the money. This show isn't just bad because of its failure to understand the body image issues upon which it comments, it also suffers from poorly developed characters, tired tropes, a nonsensical plot, and a message that isn't entirely sure what it wants to say or be. It's a bad show. If you want to be Insatiable's number one fan to get back at the (Demon voice) SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS who complained about the show before it came out, I can't stop you, but hopefully bad writing, unconvincing acting and insufferable editing will.
