Netflix Renews Controversial Series ‘Insatiable’ for Season 2

Netflix has renewed Insatiable for a second season despite immediate backlash to the show ahead of its first season, with the streaming service announcing the news on Wednesday.

Insatiable stars Debby Ryan as Patty, a teen who was bullied for her size before losing weight after she was punched in the face and had her jaw wired shut as a result. She then seeks revenge.

Before the show even premiered, its first trailer prompted a wave of criticism, with a Change.org petition even being started in an effort to prevent the show from airing. The petition gained hundreds of thousands of signatures, with many people accusing the show of fat-shaming, promoting the toxicity of diet culture and more.

Creator Lauren Gussis defended the series in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, explaining that it was based off her own experiences and called it a “cautionary tale.”

“I wanted to poke at all those issues through comedy. But every single one of the issues that these characters struggle with — from eating disorders to body dysmorphia, to sexuality to needing outside power and validation, to wanting to be perfect, to mental illness — I have struggled with every single one of those things,” she said.

“It was important to me to just let them all be out in the world, and in a world that I created, where they get to enact all of their terrible impulses to fill a hole. Because as someone who has struggled with all of them, I know my first thought is probably not the right thing,” she continued. “What happens if you act that way? There, of course, is the aspirational tale of someone who is fully healed and who does the right thing all the time. But my truth is that because of all the messages I got fed about the way that I should look or the way that I should be, I got miswired, and the impulses are not good. Then, I got to play them all out to show how damaging that actually can be.”

In addition to viewers, critics have largely not been fans of the show, with Vulture calling it an “utter disaster.”

“If only the worst thing about Netflix’s Insatiable were its lazy portrayals of fat people or its tone-deaf deployment of sexual assault and abuse as comedy or its embrace of racist tropes or its portrayals of people with Southern accents as dumb hicks or its white-hot conviction that same-sex attraction is either inherently hilarious or a teaching moment,” NPR wrote. “Oh, if only.”

Insatiable also stars Dallas Roberts, Alyssa Milano, Christopher Gorham, Erinn Westbrook, Michael Provost, Kimmy Shields, Irene Choi, and Sarah Colonna and is expected to return in 2019.

Photo Credit: Netflix