Insatiable review: This Netflix series claims to be a satire but the joke is clearly on the viewer

Everyone in showbiz would attest to the fact that ‘no publicity is bad publicity’. Netflix’s dark teen drama, Insatiable, had a Change.org petition calling for its cancellation just hours after its trailer surfaced. The trailer focused on the before-and-after life of a teenage girl who loses a bunch of weight and immediately gets recruited to become a beauty pageant queen. She dreams of exacting revenge upon those who bullied her when she was ‘Fatty Patty’. The petition argued that the show perpetuates ‘ not only the toxicity of diet culture but the objectification of women’s bodies’. [caption id=“attachment_5122441” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  A still from the trailer of Netflix’s Insatiable.[/caption] The waves of criticism intensified after Insatiable launched, early in August. Few shows, in recent years, have received this level of backlash; it has a 10 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes and it’s been called ‘the worst show Netflix has ever made’. Curiosity got the better of me recently, so I spent over 500 minutes watching its 12-episode first season. If not for all the press the show has gotten, Insatiable would have died a quiet death on my Netflix menu. Instead, morbid curiosity made me waste two days watching this lazy, fat-phobic and borderline boring show. Insatiable revolves around Patty (Debby Ryan), a 17-going-on-18, high school student who checks all boxes for how the world sees a fat person. She is lazy, depressed and unloved and spends Friday nights binge-eating and binge-watching Drew Barrymore films. Food is her crutch and after a boy rejects her, she gets into an altercation with a homeless man who tries to steal her chocolate bar. Patty is so badly injured that her jaw is wired shut. Three months of a liquid-diet results in a 70-pound weight loss and she finally has the rail-thin body she’s always wanted. Patty meets Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts), a lawyer and disgraced pageant coach who was falsely accused of sexual abuse by a contestant. Bob represents Patty when she is charged with assaulting the candy stealing homeless man. In her defense, she falsely claims that she punched the man because she feared a sexual assault. Within the first 10-minutes, it is clear that all the hate Insatiable received is more than justified. Patty punching the homeless man for stealing her chocolate is clichéd shorthand for a fat person’s shameful appetite that can drive them to violence, because they lack rationality and discipline. And then, there are the two false sexual assault accusations in just the first episode, one of which is played out for laughs as a screaming, scheming mother makes the accusation out of sheer spite. That the show doesn’t get a handle on its lead character is the biggest problem. Patty goes from being vengeance-seeking vixen to misty-eyed waif without reason or nuance. She’s obsessed with Bob only to conveniently forget all about her crush when Bob’s son comes along. She says things like “I’ve heard of women with healthy relationships with their bodies…f**k those b*t**hs” and repeats Bob’s mantra – ‘skinny is magic’. There’s even a whole episode dedicated to ‘Patty ate her twin in the womb’ because she was a compulsive over-eater even before she was born. A whole mess of other problematic characters inhabit this world: Patty’s alcoholic, neglectful mother gets competitive with Patty as soon as she loses weight; Dee, a plus-size, black lesbian who for no reason turns into the Angry Black Woman trope; and Bob’s teenage son Brick, who is sleeping with one of the mothers of Patty’s rivals. This sexual relationship between an adult and a minor is treated as comedy. Also used for laughs is Patty’s best and only friend Nonnie, who loves her but doesn’t know it yet, and the weirdly homoerotic energy Bob shares with his often shirtless rival Bob. Insatiable is meant to be satire and the jokes are supposed to be edgy; unfortunately show creator Lauren Gussis serves up a hodgepodge narrative that wildly swerves between being offensive and unfunny. The jokes fall flat and there aren’t any positive messages about body image and weight. Instead we get a show that makes jokes about rape and molestation, that pits its female characters against each other and where women are described as ‘crazy’, ‘insane’, ‘a b*t*h’ and ‘a resting a**s-face of a wife’. It doesn’t help that towards the end of season one, Insatiable switches gears from being a dark comedy to become a drama and even, a thriller. Gussis defended Insatiable by saying that the series is inspired by her own weight struggles, which makes it all the more difficult to digest. It’s shocking how someone who has dealt with body-image issues would serve up this pile of self-loathing.