Insatiable - How Bad is Netflix's Fat-Shaming Drama?

Last month, Netflix released the trailer for its new show ‘Insatiable’ and, as it appeared to fat-shame its central character, everyone kicked off. 

 

At least they did in my echo chamber. Who knows whether that’s illustrative of the web as a whole? I only really ‘like’ posts from Brian May’s Twitter account and a Usain Bolt fan site, which I think confuses the algorithms a bit. To be honest most of the reactions I saw to the Insatiable trailer had a Jamaican glam rock vibe, which I’m not sure is representative. 

Imagine 'coming of rage'.

Anyway, Insatiable is the story of an overweight teenage girl, Patty, who becomes thin, gains confidence, and wreaks revenge on the people who bullied her. It sounds simple, but having watched the first episode I can tell you that it is not.  

In fact, despite being an episode in, I don't really know what Insatiable is, in that I genuinely wouldn't be able to categorise it and can only just describe it. The closest I can get to a summary right now is 'Hannah Montana meets Desperate Housewives meets a set of Jimmy Carr one-liners from about 2008'. Maybe that's how it was pitched, I don't know. But it's as baffling as it sounds.

Basically, Insatiable has the 'feel' of a children's sitcom. One of those creepy Disney Channel shows aimed at 11-year-olds, but where all the characters are 16-year-olds played by 27-year-olds, and everyone's constantly talking about going on dates but no-one seems to have heard of sex. And it's called something like 'Random High!', and stars 'Corey Fishmore', and you just know that right now Corey Fishmore is, at best, in rehab.

I bet they've got 'gym class' next.

 
That's how it's directed, anyway. Brightly lit, badly acted, and seemingly cast by a grandparent to whom everyone under thirty looks the same. But, just when you think you've misread the press release and Insatiable is actually a kids' show, the plot gets going.

In the first episode, Patty, a teenage girl, punches a homeless man in the face, loses half her body weight, falls in love with an accused paedophile and gets him to coach her in a beauty pageant. I've never seen anything like it. It's like the final level in a Jeremy Kyle video game. I mean how are you supposed to process something that looks like CBBC's 'Kerching!' but is written like a Treehouse of Horror episode of Hollyoaks?

What's more insane is that it's basically all played for laughs. Child molestation, alcoholism, bullying, suicide. All gag-worthy, apparently. It's like watching someone prank-call Samaritans. There's even a comic sub-plot about Patty's secretly lesbian friend Nonnie (short hair, trousers - even her name sounds like a homophobic slur) being in love with her, which feels like it belongs in a misjudged 90s sitcom called 'Dick's Amoray', or 'Friends' (#satire #everyonethinksfriendsisproblematic #it'sactuallynotthatbad #surelythejokeisthatChandlerisuncomfortablewithhisdadbeingtransnotthathisdadistrans #ilovefriends).

A sub-plot is that people think this guy molests children. A sub-plot.

Insatiable is desperate to be 'edgy', then, but what struck me was how it still manages to be juvenile. The show attempts a cancer joke for no reason at all about twenty minutes in, and the best it can muster is the concept of anal cancer. That's it. They're at a fundraiser for anal cancer and the joke is that their nan had anal cancer. Imagine that. Cancer. Of the bum. Incredible. How do you set out to shock your audience and end up with a limp poo joke? It's like if Frankie Boyle started writing a stand-up routine but died halfway through, only for it to be completed by a struggling children's entertainer from the 1970s.

So Insatiable is incompetent and bizarre - but what about the fat-shaming? Well, if I'm honest, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Insatiable doesn't overtly hate fat people. It at the very least thinks the bullies who mocked Patty when she was overweight were wrong. However, its attempts at body positivity are undermined by its inconsistency. It's tough for us to believe the show cares about weight issues when we're asked, repeatedly, to laugh at fat jokes ("She broke his nose...he did try to take away her chocolate bar"). Likewise, moments that should pack an emotional punch (Patty producing a teary speech about being bullied) fail spectacularly due to their context (she is in court for having assaulted a homeless person).

She's about to make a joke about Parkinson's, probably.

As a result, it's one of those rare misfires that appeals to literally no-one. Woke millennials won't like it because it's fatphobic and insensitive, but insensitive fatphobes won't like it because there are more than three women in it and none of them are burned as witches.

You wonder how it got commissioned. These days you only have to glance at social media to get a clear view of what people want, and it's not whatever the hell Insatiable is. No. It's that clip of the Jamaican relay team singing We Are The Champions that's been trending for about four years. I mean come on Netflix, this is simple stuff.