I just finished binge-watching “Insatiable,” the critically skewered (11% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes vs. 76% liked by viewers) but fan favored Netflix series where Alyssa Milano plays a wannabe socialite trying to escape from her so-called “white trash” upbringing. Count me as one of the 76%. Also count as an appreciative fan Daniel Schoerder who wrote in Outward, Slate’s home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture: “What All the Critics Misunderstand About Netflix’s Insatiable:”
There’s a new show on Netflix called Insatiable, but, ironically, most critics seem to have had quite enough. Jen Chaney at Vulture: “The show is so bad that even passing attempts to draw parallels between itself and funnier, more insightful classics leaves a bad taste in the mouth.” Linda Holmes for NPR: “This is the purest evidence yet that Netflix has plenty of seasons of Friends and a lot of cute avatar options but no quality control.” And Roxane Gay in Refinery29: “Insatiable’s greatest sin is that it suffers from a profound lack of imagination.” Open a review of this show on the internet, and you’ll almost certainly find an excoriating critique. Ouch!
I say ouch not for Insatiable, but for the critics—because they’re all wrong.
Following the glow-up of former fat girl Patty Bladell (Debby Ryan) as she comes back from a summer of having her jaw wired shut, skinny and ready for revenge, and disgraced pageant coach Bob Armstrong (Dallas Roberts), who thinks she’s his ticket to a comeback, Insatiable is a surreally wild comedy that’s also low-key the most progressive thing on TV right now.
Schroeder says of Milano: (she is the) “perfect white trash turned socialite as Armstrong’s wife, Coralee.”
Then I saw Alyssa Milano wins ‘bet’ that she will get more retweets than Trump does from his alleged 54 million followers. According to Newsweek, 15 million of Trump’s Twitter followers are fake.
Fans of “Charmed” remember Ms. Milano as Phoebe Halliwell. It ran from 1998-2006 . Before that she played Samantha Micelli in 196 episodes of Who’s the Boss from 1984-1992. As she became an established actress she also became a progressive activist.
In the late 1980s she contacted Ryan White, a schoolboy ostracized for having AIDS and became friends with him. She ended up appearing together on The Phil Donahue Show with him where she kissed him in order to show that she could not catch the disease through casual contact with him. (Wikipedia) Just the other day it was announced that she would receive GLAAD’s Inaugural Ariadne Getty Ally Award.
On August 30th The Hill published “Alyssa Milano: News media continues to normalize Trump.”
Some quotes:
- "The media actually normalized some of what he did, and continues to normalize it instead of going ‘Can you believe how crazy this is? This guy wants to do this,' "
- “I don’t think it’s enough, (what the media has done) and I don’t think it was enough when he was campaigning. I think that we coddled this idea of a man who has been a self-proclaimed pussy grabber.”
- "During this time, instead of calling it what it was, which was total and crazy bullshit that this guy would actually be allowed to be the leader of the greatest country on the planet, the most powerful country on the planet, the fact that instead of news media going ‘This is just crazy,’ they reported it like it was normal, so it completely normalized the entire thing. We looked at it like ‘This is entertaining. This is getting us ratings.’”
Fox News even covered her on August 26th: “Alyssa Milano calls for gun control, healthcare reform in video protesting Brett Kavanaugh's SCOTUS appointment” which includes a video.
And then there’s Donald Trump who is now is using Twitter as he tries to make light of the latest news about his black community support: Poll: Disapproval of Trump, impeachment support highest with black voters.
It’s true that polls showed a bump in support among black males after he came out for Trump but that didn’t last long after it became apparent in follow-up interviews that Mr. West, to put it politely, wasn’t a star student of political science. Among celebrity supporters, I stack up Kanye, Tiger, George Foreman, Jim Brown, Jon Voight, Kid Rock, the Duck Dynasty guy, Gary Busy, and all the rest of the 36 or so who came out for Trump together and they still don’t come close to equalling Alyssa Milano in intellectual heft.
Hell, they don’t even add up to one Omarosa Manigault.