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Controversial Netflix series renewed for a second season

People are REELING.

Netflix’s most controversial series—Insatiable— has been renewed for a second season… and people are furious. 

The streaming service confirmed the news late last week and since then, many have expressed their outrage. 

For over a year, viewers have been calling for the show to be axed due to the harmful effect it could have on young and impressionable teens.

The series follows Patty (Debby Ryan), an overweight teen who is dubbed as “Fatty Patty” and bullied mercilessly as a result. However, after a summer of having her jaw wired shut, Patty sheds a heap of weight and suddenly returns to school as the newest member of the popular group.

The show promotes “fat/body shaming” and excessive weight loss (which in turn could trick teens into thinking that losing weight is the key to minimising their self-esteem issues), the Netflix series hasn’t been well received. 

A Change.org petition—which has over 235,000 signatures—was even created in an attempt to encourage the discontinuation of the contentious show. 

“For so long, the narrative has told women and young impressionable girls that in order to be popular, have friends, to be desirable for the male gaze, and to some extent be a worthy human … that we must be thin,” the petition reads. “This series will cause eating disorders, and perpetuate the further objectification of women’s bodies. The trailer has already triggered people with eating disorders. Let’s stop this, and protect further damage.”

“Insatiable is insufferable — bad TV, on any scale, by any measure. The wannabe-Heathers is boring-as-hell, its characters barely rise above caricature, its storyline, such as it is, meanders about with no purpose and it’s tonally all over the place,” news.com.au’s TV critic Wenlei Ma wrote.“In other words, it’s a hot mess. The kind of hot mess you want to banish into the ether, never to be chanced upon by any human eyes ever again.”

Despite the backlash, cast member Debbie Ryan has defended the premise, sharing her personal struggles with body image issues in an attempt to squash the backlash:
“It was very important to Lauren Gussis, our writer and showrunner from whose brain and heart and life the character of Patty was born, as well as to me, that any scenes where Patty was heavier don’t use her size as a punchline, and never justify the abuse she suffers,” she wrote in a lengthy Twitter post. “The humour is not in the fat-shaming (or thin-shaming, slut-shaming, virgin-shaming, ‘glam-shaming,’ for fans of Arie’s season of the Bachelor…). The redemption is in identifying the bullies and saying ‘this is not okay.’”

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