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Insatiable
Available on Netflix SA
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It flips from genre to genre every two minutes, the characters are offensive and the themes jumbled, and there’s a Change.org petition with more than 112 000 signatures to ban it for fat-shaming.
This is Netflix teen drama Insatiable and it might be one of the streaming service’s most bizarre series yet.
The plot revolves around Patty, a teenager who loses weight after she’s hit on the jaw by a homeless man and has to go on a liquid diet. She then becomes “really hot” and teams up with pageant coach Bob to achieve her dream of “finally feeling beautiful”. Yup, you read that right.
If Insatiable only stuck to this ridiculous premise and went balls-to-the-wall camp, it might have worked. Instead it tries to infuse wokeness, horror, satire, and teen melodrama all into one. It’s a weird mix of Gossip Girl, My Name is Earl and The Twilight Zone, and none of it works.
In one scene, Patty organises a bikini dog wash to raise money for charity so she can qualify for a pageant called Miss Magic Jesus. When the dog wash gets out of hand, her romantic interest rounds up a group of drag queens in bikinis from an LGBTQ centre to help out. I can only guess this was an attempt by the creator to inject queer visibility into the show, but it was ham-handed, offensive and didn’t make any sense.
In the first season alone, the audience is subjected to the following plot lines: Patty finding out she ate her twin sister in the womb; Patty getting an exorcism; Patty being stalked by her high school crush who once kidnapped someone in Brazil; Patty becoming a mascot for a fast food chain called Weiner Taco and then pushing her pageant rival off a truck.
I know, fair reader, that your interest may now be piqued, but believe me, Insatiable is not worth your time. I watched it right through just to convince myself it was actually happening.
