My motto in the peak TV glut remains as follows: Sometimes no review is the review. A few minutes into the first episode, it’s clear that “Insatiable” isn’t worth anybody’s time or words.
Here are 10 things you should know about Netflix’s “Insatiable”:
1. Here we are, having to say something, mostly because 100,000-plus people were moved, after seeing a trailer for the series earlier this summer, to sign one of those utterly useless online petitions and cry out from the bottomless pit of Twitter, demanding (demanding!) that Netflix preempt “Insatiable” and never stream it.
2. The show’s alleged crime? Egregious fat-shaming, vis-a-vis its main character, Patty (Debby Ryan), a socially ostracized, overweight high school student.
3. Patty soon undergoes an implausible transformation, after she’s injured in a fistfight with a homeless man in front of a convenience store. While her jaw is wired shut for a few months, the pounds melt away.
4. At her trial for assault, Patty’s attorney, Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts), is smitten with his client’s newfound va-va-voom. Bob, you see, is a pageant coach – married to a Southern belle (Alyssa Milano), yet flouncy and flamboyant in his every step and swish. (If there was any pre-outrage about that stereotype, I must have missed it.)
5. The episodes, which are all at least 20 minutes too long, are propelled by the animosity that exists among its many characters, each of whom are sort of rotten to the core, including another conniving contestant coach named Stella (Beverly D’Angelo, who can commiserate with Milano over this ill-fated gig). Stella soon schemes to steal Patty away from Bob Armstrong.
6. The show specializes in the easiest forms of scripted cruelty and snark. The fat-shaming, such that it even exists, is brief and nowhere nearly as harmful as the middling idiocy of the entire effort. That’s my review and also a scolding: If you’re watching this, you really need better things to do.
7. Hold on, I’m not done. “Insatiable” was first ordered by the CW broadcast network, which wisely passed on airing it, at which point Netflix snatched it up. By design, Netflix has little interest in developing anything like a house style or sense of smell for the many half-okay series it throws our way every month. Instead, anything and everything goes.
8. Even with the scant data the company makes available for public scrutiny, it’s not hard to tell that Netflix is slowly skewing toward a teen- and young-adult market, because who else is willing to binge-watch as much mediocrity as a shut-in, wired-up teenager? This is probably what vexed “Insatiable’s” pre-detractors, who saw in the trailer a blunt and harmfully inaccurate message that overweight kids don’t amount to anything until they become thin.
9. Fat lotta good the protest did – the show premiered Friday and all 13 episodes are now available. The show’s creator, Lauren Gussis, asked viewers to hold off their outrage until they’d at least seen it; she also shared her own tales of teenage self-image issues.
10. And it’s true, that if you tilt the angle slightly, “Insatiable” can come across as a wry take on pageant culture and its accompanying nonsense – including its warped beauty standards.
I’m glad that Netflix, which is so big it can play deaf with most of its critics, never flinched and let the series stream as scheduled.
