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Critic Reviews
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Rae’s triumph on Insecure is in making a smart, funny show about issues both universal and specific. It’s a brilliant commentary on love and friendship that manages to bring a fresh vision to the table, and that by itself feels quietly revolutionary.
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Fearless, relatable, goofy and charmingly awkward, she’s just a joy to watch. She has a strong voice, too.
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There’s no capital-letter message here, but Rae’s portrayal of a black woman’s life is still revolutionary.
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A fresh, sharp-edged comedy that swerves past nearly every cliché.
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Insecure is simple, funny and authentic.
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In other words: they’re actual, believable people. It’s easy to root for them even as it hurts to watch them stumble--a combination that makes Insecure an immediate force to be reckoned with.
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It’s an honest, unflinching look at dating, relationships and life, told from a refreshing and hilarious perspective.
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Insecure is a show with great confidence--Rae immediately sweeps you up and carries you along on her journey of false starts, little triumphs, and big disappointments.
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Like “Louie,” “Atlanta,” and “Better Things,” the show operates more as a slice of life than as a plotted story. It’s an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary, relatable, and delightful person.
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Its larger accomplishment of showcasing Rae’s talents and underrepresented characters in a sublime comedy is worth celebrating.
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A show that cannot help but carry with it the burden of being a standard-bearer for diverse voices on television, even as it attempts to be, you know, funny. Insecure proves to be ably up to the challenge. The show marries specific issues with universal questions to create situations that are both precise and affecting. ... Issa herself is a profane, brilliant lead character.
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Like FX's Atlanta, the season’s best new comedy, Insecure is fighting, and winning, a two-front war: Exploring what's different about the black experience while reminding us that much of that experience is shared by us all. There’s nothing limited or limiting about Insecure.
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Some of Rae’s best moments during the six episodes made available or review are when her character squares off with herself in a mirror and rehearses what she should or shouldn’t say in big moments.
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Yes, Issa, Molly and Lawrence are all a bit insecure; heck, the world itself is insecure. But this show is strong in the face of it all.
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Insecure is less inherently dramatic than some of the other Comedies In Theory, which makes the infrequency of laugh-out-loud moments a bigger issue than on, say, Casual, but Rae is a really engaging writer and performer, and the series is charming and compulsively watchable.
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More experimentation occurs in later episodes and works to varying degrees. Time-lapse videos are implemented to great effect, while at least one dream sequence feels like a dangerously distracting red herring. These evolving ideas and developing structures speak to how Insecure is still finding itself, just like Issa.
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Who is the real Issa? Neither... or more likely both. That’s the series, and also the wellspring of the humor, which tends to be fleeting, subtle or, in a few instances, flat-out funny.
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It’s a professionalized version of Rae's homely original that maintains her voice while sharpening everything that surrounds and supports it.
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Issa the character may be a work in progress, but the woman writing and playing her knows exactly what she's doing.
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Insecure might lose ground to other shows in the straight-up laughs department, but after just six episodes it already feels among the top of the pack in terms of effective, richly detailed stories delivered with a razor sharp and deeply human edge.
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Issa’s troubles--and Insecure itself--feel authentic even if the series is only intermittently funny.
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At first, the relative inexperience of the cast shows, but they settle in over subsequent episodes, and the writing starts strong and gets better. Insecure is a remarkably observant show about “big issues” like race, class and education, but they’re woven into the fabric of a character study.
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Insecure could be seen as another iteration of the "Girls" generation from an African-American perspective. But Rae brings a completely distinctive voice to it, and the show can be quite funny.
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Its stories of buppie frustration and romance, set in Los Angeles, aren’t revolutionary, but they’re funny and moving, powered by Ms. Rae’s ear for dialogue of a kind of crystalline, pitch-perfect profanity.
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It's a smart and often funny look at young people looking for love and professional satisfaction in Los Angeles, which is about as common a genre as TV has to offer these days. But taken in the totality of the TV landscape, Rae's voice is one that wasn't being heard and that voice is what makes Insecure stand out, not necessarily as better than the Emmy winners or critical favorites in the field, but as gratifyingly distinguishable.
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Few series have conveyed such a clear sense of all the different people that black professional women are required to be, and none has done such a fine job of conveying this visually as well as in performance and dialogue.
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What stands out most about Insecure is not its matter-of-fact approach to race but its matter-of-fact approach to wanting a romantic partner.
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Insecure comes off as insightful, witty, and sincerely delightful, even as its narrative backbone is formed by tremendous philosophical concepts.
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Insecure is brazenly confident in its comic, profane authenticity. [3-9 Oct 2016, p.23]
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Everything about Insecure, though, is not just palatable but completely charming, thanks to Rae’s relatable honesty and irrepressible humor.
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It’s a funny, well-written and well-acted series about appealing young men and women at a point in their lives between carefree youth and accepting adult responsibilities.
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The character dynamics are genuine and refreshing and also quite funny; although Insecure features its share of angst from its main characters, it never loses sight of the comedy, which often comes from the way that Issa and Molly feel slightly out of place among all of their supposed peer groups. The show stumbles when it focuses on a love triangle.
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Seems less a sitcom than a character study inflected by melancholy humor and hip-hop idioms. It sometimes tries a bit too hard to flash its street credentials (the episodes all have titles like "Messy as Fuck" and "Thirsty as Fuck"), but that's more than compensated for by its obdurate refusal to bill itself as the master narrative of black women. It's content to be the piquant story of two confused friends trying to navigate the uncertainties of the young-adult world.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 75 out of 98
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Mixed: 6 out of 98
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Negative: 17 out of 98
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Oct 9, 2016
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Jan 16, 2017
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Dec 19, 2016