Insatiable

Insatiable is excitingly preposterous. ... That there is a high degree of difficulty to the comic twistedness of such developments goes toward the nerve of the series’ creator, Lauren Gussis, whose confidence seems winning as long as the pace keeps up (and misplaced when episodes grow slack with meandering scenarios and repetitious dialogue).

Patty is important--but she’s not Insatiable’s main dish. Strangely and crucially, her viewpoint often gets lost, ignored or brushed aside, at least in the early episodes. The focus of this dark comedy is Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts).

The controversial new Netflix comedy is filled with giant themes about radical weight loss, the superficiality of appearances, identity, parenting, and revenge, but they don’t nearly add up to a coherent message, never mind an affirming message. There’s no there there, when it comes to the show’s broad intentions. It’s just a jumble of provocations, half-baked jokes, random cultural satire, farce, bad puns, and attempted campiness that ultimately doesn’t make a unified point.

Maybe, deep down, there is a decent series buried within Insatiable. Right now, however, it feels like a dozen different and equally bewildering shows happening all at once--and not a single one knows where its strengths might actually lie.

Insatiable makes “Norbit” feel like a comedic masterpiece, and in 2018, there’s nothing noble about that distinction.

It spends all of its time striving desperately to reach the status of third-tier Ryan Murphy and falling flat. It has Murphy’s gleeful sadism in spades, but none of his manic camp energy; it has his treacly didacticism, but none of his genuine emotion.

Insatiable is trite, way over the top (even for a series that appears to be trying to go there for comedic effect), unfunny and, running at 40-plus minutes per episode, a bloated mess that's labor-intensive to get through.

Insatiable is a harsh example of the best intentions yielding the worst results. ... Insatiable is unforgivably inelegant as satire. It fails not only to land its purportedly progressive message about body image and weight, but also its storylines tackling sexuality, sexual agency, classism, race, and transgender acceptance.

So many problems plague Netflix’s original series it’s only option is the scrap heap, where a few spare parts can be salvaged to sustain other functioning vehicles.

I know that there is a human creator behind Netflix’s Insatiable. But this would-be binge-watch—so sloppy that it borders on inadvertent brilliance—is the exact sort of muddled glop that Netflix’s algorithm might come up with on its own.

It turns out the show is not as bad as you imagined. It’s actually worse. Like, worse in ways that you can’t even anticipate. Insatiable is impressive in its capacity offend a vast array of ideologies, including the notion that TV in 2018 should really be a hell of a lot smarter and more nuanced than this. On top of all that, it’s a freakin’ narrative mess.

It is somewhat staggering how badly Insatiable fumbles everything it attempts. ... The lack of care this series has for its characters is topped only by the lack of respect it has for its viewers; its veneer of edginess almost as thoughtless as its later attempts at playing “woke.” It’s empty and cynical.

Insatiable purports to be satire, playing every bit of offensive dialogue and questionable storyline for laughs, yet none of it is funny.